Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think, And What We Can

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CHAPTER 2: Neural Plasticity: Nature's Double-Edged Sword

The large auditorium is hushed as the lights dim and a statistical chart appears on the screen. I reflect momentarily that I have never heard a large group of educators this quiet.

"Now, I'll show you the effects of different environments on our animals' brains." Dr. Marian Diamond wields her laser pointer triumphantly. "We've been working at this for more than thirty years, so I hope you'll forgive me if I skip just a little." The audience chuckles appreciatively and subsides into rapt attention as Dr. Diamond continues. "Here's a summary of the data comparing brain size and weight of rats reared in the standard cages, those who lived in the 'impoverished' environments, and here" -- she pauses dramatically -- "are the results with the animals who lived in the enrichment cages. Notice how, with increasing amounts of environmental enrichment, we see brains that are larger and heavier, with increased dendritic branching. That means those nerve cells can communicate better with each other. With the enriched environments we also get more support cells because the nerve cells are getting bigger. Not only that, but the junction between the cells -- the synapse -- also increases its dimensions. These are highly significant effects of differential experience. It certainly shows how dynamic the nervous system is and how responsive it is to its internal and external surroundings."

This international audience has gathered to hear many speakers describe new concepts for education, but Dr. Diamond is clearly the star attraction. A professor of neuroanatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, she has pioneered studies that have opened scientists' eyes -- and minds -- about the power of environmental factors in physically altering the dimensions of growing brains. In experiments described in her book Enriching Heredity [1] and elaborated on in the next chapter, rats in an "enriched" environment, actively interested and challenged by frequent new learning experiences, develop larger and heavier brains and also show increased ability to run mazes, the best available test of a rat's intelligence. Moreover, in a series of recent experiments, she has demonstrated for the first time that the effects of personal involvement in new learning appear to be so powerful that rats of any age can develop new brain connections if they intensely pursue new challenges. "Yes," she concludes, with a flourish, "if we work hard enough at it we can even change the very old brain."

She is immediately besieged with questions. Aren't there some basic learning abilities the environment can't change'? What about heredity? "Heredity plays a highly important role in the form of these different [behavioral] repertoires," she acknowledges, "but we now have clear evidence that the environment can play a role in shaping brain structure and, in turn, learning behavior. It is the area of the brain that is stimulated that grows." [2]

The auditorium resonates with an undercurrent of response. An elementary school principal seated next to me whispers, "If this applies to human brains, too, think of the implications for teachers -- and for parents!"

I am eager to talk with Dr. Diamond, and an hour later, when she has finally been released by a swarm of questioners, I have my chance. This world-renowned scientist turns out to be an approachable and thoughtful person-- and it soon becomes evident that she takes her own theories to heart. Our conversation takes place as we stride vigorously through a nearby woods, impelled by the enthusiasm with which she approaches new ideas as well as new physical challenges. She has just returned from her first kayaking trip and is about to embark on a six-week teaching assignment in Africa.

Although Dr. Diamond is obviously convinced that stimulation is good for human as well as for rat brains, I am curious about how confidently we can apply her animal research to children. I explain my questions about the effects of contemporary culture on children's brains. Do neuroanatomists believe that the brains of children, like those of the rats, can be changed by their environments?

"To those of us in the field, there is absolutely no doubt that culture changes brains, and there's no doubt in my mind that children's brains are changing," she replies. "Whatever they're learning, as those nerve cells are getting input, they are sending out dendritic branches. As long as stimuli come in to a certain area, you get more branching; if you lose the stimuli, they stop branching. It is the pattern of the branching that differentiates among us. The cortex is changing all the time -- I call it 'the dance of the neurons.' This is true in the brains of cats, dogs, rats, monkeys, or man." [3]

Many similar experiments have convinced other scientists of the changeability -- they call it plasticity -- of brains. Although it is obviously impossible to conduct similar studies on humans, researchers agree both on the validity of principles derived from animal experiments and on the fact that human brains are probably the most plastic of all. Another expert in the field, Dr. Victor H. Denenberg, recently commented, "One would expect even more powerful and more subtle effects with the human, whose brain is vastly more complicated than that of the rat, and who lives in a much more complex social and environmental milieu." [4]

With the reality of brain plasticity well-accepted in scientific circles, it was still a new idea for many of the educators attending Dr. Diamond's presentation.

"I guess it seems obvious, but I somehow never really believed that what I did in the classroom would physically influence the size or shape of my students' brains!" commented one teacher. "It does put being a teacher -- or a parent, for that matter -- in a whole new light."

Indeed it does. In order to interpret any research responsibly, however, it is necessary to understand it. Although scientists themselves do not claim to have any final answers, this chapter will summarize what is currently known about environments as sculptors of growing minds both before and after birth. Let us start by entangling ourselves briefly in a very old, but fundamental, controversy.

THE ADAPTABLE BRAIN

"Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined." Common sense suggests that growing organisms are highly adaptable to external influences, but what seemed so apparent to Alexander Pope has caused psychologists to argue bitterly for years. How much is mental ability shaped by environments and how much is in the hands of heredity? After all, the tree still develops bark, leaves, and a functioning root system no matter how the twig gets bent. Psychologists have tried to resolve this issue with studies comparing identical and fraternal twins. Currently, heredity and environment are each assigned roughly 50 (or 40, or 60)% of the credit. As parents of wiggly little children can understand, however, their physical behavior resists numerical formulas -- and so does their mental behavior: learning. So-called "nature-nurture" interactions are complex. For example, in a case to be considered in a later chapter, a learning disability that runs in families may result from changes in the child's brain before birth. Cells in the fetal brain get rearranged by chemicals produced because of an inherited response of the mother's own autoimmune system (don't worry, scientists are confused, too) -- which the child may also inherit. Would you say this disability is caused by heredity or by the prenatal environment?

In another controversial example, children from lower socioeconomic groups tend to score below average on standard IQ tests. Is this because poor environments depress their intelligence, or because they never learned good test-taking skills, or because, as some believe, families with nonstandard intellectual endowment might get trapped in lower socioeconomic groups? In another chapter, when we consider the results of efforts to alter such children's intelligence, we will see how difficult it is to sort out these factors.

Brain research is now giving these old issues an interesting new dimension by changing the focus from heredity versus environment to heredity plus environment. Until recently, so little has been known about the "brain" that most theorists sidestepped it when trying to explain intelligence (and they produced some mindless theories as a result). Now we acknowledge that the basic genetic architecture for our brains lies at the heart of all learning and even much of our emotional behavior. When these inherited patterns interact with the child's environment, plasticity guarantees an unlimited number of interesting variations. The final pattern is determined by the way each individual uses that unique brain.

Behavior Changes Brains and Brains Change Behavior

"Do you really mean that the way children use their brains causes physical changes in them?" Since I began the research for this book, I have heard this question from almost everyone to whom I have talked -- everyone, that is, except the neuroscientists. Their response is quite different, more along the lines of, "So, what else is new?" These scientists already understand that experience -- what children do every day, the ways in which they think and respond to the world, what they learn, and the stimuli to which they decide to pay attention -- shapes their brains. Not only does it change the ways in which the brain is used (functional change), but it also causes physical alterations (structural change) in neural wiring systems.

"Would I be safe in saying that if you change what a child does with his or her brain, you're physically going to change that brain?" I asked Dr. Kenneth A. Klivington of the Salk Institute in San Diego, California.

"That's absolutely correct," he replied. "Structure and function are inseparable. We know that environments shape brains; all sorts of experiments have demonstrated that it happens. There are some studies currently being done that show profound differences in the structure of the brain depending on what is taken in by the senses."

We will return later to these and other studies, but before we get too far into the details, we should undertake a look at the way the brain develops before and after birth, focusing on this whole concept of its changeability. A good starting point is the brain's most basic structure -- the cells and their connections -- for therein lies the secret of neural plasticity.

Networking Neurons

All brains consist of two types of cells: nerve cells, called neurons, and glial cells. The neurons, numbering in the billions, arrive in the world ready and waiting to connect themselves together in flexible networks to fire messages within and between parts of the brain. No new cerebral cortical neurons will be added after birth, but since each of these nerve cells is capable of communicating with thousands of other neurons, the potential for neural networking is virtually incomprehensible. Surrounding glial cells provide the catering service for the nervous system, supporting and nourishing the neurons as they go about their delicate task of creating, firing, and maintaining the connections for thinking.

If you hold your hand out in front of you with fingers extended, you can get a rough idea of the shape of the average neuron. Your palm represents the cell body, with its central nucleus, and your outreaching fingers are dendrites. These microscopic projections extend in treelike formations to act as intake systems, picking up messages from other neurons and relaying them to the cell body. After reaching your palm, a message would travel down your arm, which represents the axon, or output system. When it reaches the end of the axon, it must jump across a small gap called a synapse before being picked up by dendrites from a neighboring neuron. This primordial intellectual leap is facilitated by chemicals -- called neurotransmitters or neuromodulators. It is repeated untold billions of times as this vast array of potential goes about the business of daily mental activity. The strength and efficiency of synaptic connections determine the speed and power with which your brain functions. The most important news about synapses is that they are formed, strengthened, and maintained by interaction with experience.

New Experiences: New Connections

Dr. Richard M. Lerner, professor of child and adolescent development at Pennsylvania State University, and author of On the Nature of Human Plasticity [5] points out that you can't have a developing, changing, responsive organism without its brain being able to be altered structurally by environmental encounters. Structural change, in this case, does not mean growing new neurons, but rather creating new structures, like road systems, between the ones that are already there. As the structures of dendrites and synapses change in response to experience, the new pathways formed allow different functions to follow them so the child becomes able to master new skills. The brain's flexibility is also increased, since new pathways provide alternate routes to the same destination. During our discussion, Dr. Lerner used the analogy of a road system in a developing town. At first, there may be only one road through town; as alternate routes form, a driver has more choices of how to get to a destination. The structural changes are comparable to building a new road, and the functional ones to deciding which of several roads to take to reach a goal. The systems are mutually interactive, since the roads are constructed as a response to demands for certain types of functions.

I asked Dr. Lerner about the possibility that children's brains today might be constructing slightly different road systems from those, say, twenty years ago. If they are being attracted to different types of stimuli, both structure and function could be altered, he acknowledged. Yes, taking a large group of children and exposing them to certain experiences might modify them in a particular direction. Of course, any conclusions of this sort would require a good deal of evidence, this conservative scientist hastened to add. [6]

Scientists hesitate to make definitive statements on this point because they have not had the technology available to get the evidence for large groups of "normal" children. Even with new computerized techniques of brain imaging, it is still difficult to pin down subtle changes at the level of the neuron. Moreover, most research dollars have gone to the pressing issue of serious disability, so most available evidence comes from youngsters whose brains have been injured through illness or accident. They provide dramatic evidence for plasticity. Frequently children master skills even when the neurons thought to be important are missing or damaged. For example, very young children with severe injury in the brain's language areas can develop remarkably good abilities to talk, understand language, read, and write. These brains have been able to develop new structural connections to bypass injured areas and also to reorganize functionally by using alternate, undamaged areas. With a cast of understudies, the final performance is usually somewhat impaired, but young brains are astonishingly flexible.

What about older ones? While new tricks are indeed harder for old synapses, studies of stroke victims prove that with sufficient effort the human brain may be remolded to some extent at any age. The latest research confirms this principle for healthy brains as well. In fact, as I write this book and you read it, our brains are not even the same from moment to moment. The very acts of writing and reading are doubtless changing, very subtly, the way some cells connect together. I find this idea thought-provoking, and I can even become somewhat confounded thinking that while I am thinking this thought-provoking thought, my brain is probably being changed by it!

It is much more difficult, however, to reorganize a brain than it is to organize it in the first place. "Organization inhibits reorganization," say the scientists. [7] Carving out neuronal tracks for certain types of learning is best accomplished when the synapses for that particular skill are most malleable, before they "firm up" around certain types of responses.

Hard Wiring and Open Circuits

Animal brains have an easy time of it. They carry out many of the basic routines of keeping alive, fed, and safe, reproducing and caring for the young, with preprogrammed neural systems that do the work without asking questions. While these more primitive brains are clearly capable of learning, more of their cells are committed to hardwired networks genetically programmed to function with a minimum of flexibility.

Human brains depend on these hard-wired systems, too, but we also have larger areas of uncommitted tissue that can mold itself around the demands of a particular environment. A human brain is thus well adapted for life in a complex society. Our species has a better chance for survival with mental equipment flexibly engineered for the challenges of an ever-changing world. Thus, human brains and the culture they generate are intertwined. As the culture acts to modify our brains, they, in turn, act to modify the culture. [8]

Researchers have debated heatedly about which learning abilities are hard-wired and which are more open to experience. One of the foremost authorities on early brain development, Dr. William T. Greenough [9, 10] of the University of Illinois, has recently found a new way of looking at this problem. According to his explanation, some systems, which he calls experience expectant, are specifically designed to be easily activated by the type of environmental information that a member of a species may ordinarily be expected to encounter. Most human infants, for example, have sufficient visual, auditory, and tactile experiences to activate circuits for seeing, hearing, and touching. These brain cells require proper experience at the proper time, but even a brief period of normal input causes connections to be formed.

Some aspects of more complex skills like language also seem to be built into this "experience expectant" system; the brain "expects" to be stimulated by a set of sounds and some basic grammatical rules (e. g., little children soon pick up the idea that verbs come before objects -- "want cookie"), so these abilities are learned readily by children who have even minimal language experiences in early years. Experience-expectant neurons can be foiled, however. Later in this chapter we will consider what happens to children deprived of even basic sensory experiences.

The open circuitry that accounts for many human learning abilities, however, develops from connections that Greenough calls experience dependent. These systems are unique to each individual's experience and account for the fact that we all have quite different brains! For example, learning about one's physical environment, mastering a particular vocabulary, or trying to pass algebra means the brain must receive enough usable stimulation to carve out its own unique systems of connections between cells.

Since so many children these days seem to lack higher-level language development, I decided Greenough's research might offer a clue. I asked him whether all language should develop almost automatically from a minimum of environmental exposure (experience expectant), or whether higher-level language abilities might depend more on special amounts and types of input into the system (experience dependent).

"My opinion is that language development is heavily experience dependent," he replied, "and therefore would have a great deal to do with the way a child is reared. Hypothetically, children who grew up receiving a great deal of their input from television, for example, might be different from children who grew up getting input from an individual speaker."

"If they get different types of language input, could the language areas of children's brains be subtly different from those of twenty years ago?" I asked.

"I think you can make a case for it, although our work can only indirectly say anything about that. What we know is that the brain very selectively can be shown to respond to its particular experiences; if an animal, for example, learns a motor task, you see very selective changes in the brain regions that govern that task; so that there is no question that these changes are highly specific to the events that produce them. It's certainly quite conceivable that a major difference in the way in which kids grew up would lead to a major difference in brain organization for information processing. There's remarkably little evidence available, however," he added.

"Is it possible that the pace of our contemporary life, when many children are constantly being stimulated from outside so that they have little time to sit, think, reflect, and talk to themselves inside their own heads -- could that make a physical difference in their brains?" I ventured.

"I think it's a reasonable hypothesis," Dr. Greenough responded thoughtfully.

In a later chapter we will examine research that sheds considerable light on some of the subtle language deficiencies shown by many of the current generation. For now, let us resume our survey of how the brain learns to think -- and what happens if it doesn't. While I personally believe that most of the worrisome changes now occurring in children's brains are caused by intellectual environments, some drugs and chemicals to which children are now exposed before birth may also be contributing to the increased incidence of learning difficulties.

THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

The very flexibility of systems that rely on experience for their shaping, or even for their survival, makes plasticity a double-edged sword. On one side is the optimistic news that brains are designed to make the most out of the situations in which they find themselves. At any age we take an active role in shaping our own brains according to what we choose to notice and respond to. On the other hand, however, lie several serious issues. What happens if significant numbers of cells are damaged during the process of development so they can't respond efficiently? What if the "right" stimulation is not available? Is it possible to focus too heavily on one set of stimuli and neglect others? In order to address these complex questions, we must first get an overview of the prenatal process that sets the neurons into place. Then we will move on to consider sources of flaws in the system.

Building the Fetal Brain: Neurons Compete to Survive

Most people are unaware that nature over-endows us with brain cells, yet this apparent wastefulness is our assurance of adaptable mental equipment. In the nine months before birth, the fetal brain grows rapidly from a small cluster of cells into an organ that contains too many neurons. By the fourth week of gestation it has started to differentiate into separate areas. Neurons and glial cells are produced at a rapid rate and then, to the continuing amazement of neuroanatomists, manage somehow to "migrate" to the areas for which they were designed.

The first cells out form areas for more basic functions such as physical drives, reflex movements, and balance. Somewhat later come relay stations for sensory stimuli and some technical equipment to help with memory and emotion. These abilities are mainly "hardwired" into systems underlying the neocortex, whose convoluted surface covers the rest of the brain like an elaborate layer of gray frosting. Hardly a superficial addition, however, the cortex is the control panel for processing information at three levels:

1. receiving sensory stimuli

2. organizing them into meaningful patterns so that we can make sense out of the world

3. associating patterns to develop abstract types of learning and thinking

These later-developing "association areas," so critically important for planning, reasoning, and using language to express ideas, are the most plastic of all; their development depends on the way the child uses his or her brain at different stages of development.

Surprisingly enough, all these abilities emerge as a result of a violent competition by which the brain literally "prunes" out and disposes of its excess neurons. Because there is a limited number of available connection sites, the mortality rate for neurons is staggering. Even before birth up to 40-60% die off because they can't find a permanent home. During gestation, each cell migrating to the cortex tries to find a prearranged spot in one of six layers. They don't all arrive, however. The first cells out arrange themselves in the first, or inner, layer, and the later arrivals quite literally must climb between and beyond them, stacking themselves up until eventually all six layers have formed. The final layers hold the potential for the highest-order, latest-developing mental abilities, but these cells have the hardest job finding their proper station in life.

"So, you can see right away that we can all be considered brain damaged in one respect," wryly observes Dr. Jane Holmes Bernstein. [11] But some of us get labeled, and some don't. As we talk, I notice that one wall of her office in Boston Children's Hospital is covered with drawings made by some of the children that she sees every day. As a clinical neuropsychologist working with children called learning disabled, she attempts to understand behavior -- primarily learning behavior -- in terms of brain structure and function. She is convinced that brain shapes behavior, but also that experience in the world shapes the brain as it develops, through a process that she terms "competition for connections." This mechanism is initiated before birth by nature's clever overproduction of neurons.

"Cell death appears to be a natural consequence of the competition for connections: those cells that don't connect are lost. Ideally, this process will result in a very efficient structure, but it can go wrong, too. Sometimes damage before birth to an early-maturing part may lead to abnormal patterns of connections; if early-arriving cells preempt the connections that should belong to later arrivals, the later ones have nowhere to go and sort of fall off the cliff. It's important to realize that early development after birth may seem normal -- after all, some basic connections have been made; later on, however, it's likely to be a different story. Higher-order thinking skills that should develop with maturation have no foundation!" [12]

What happens, then, to the potential learning ability of this brain? Why would nature set up such a risky system for developing mental connections?

"It seems to me that this sort of competitive connectivity model is the basis for a great deal of our uniqueness as individuals. The playing out of these patterns is presumably what allows brains to be generally competent at the same skills but different in the individual case," reflects Dr. Bernstein.

Not everyone agrees with Dr. Bernstein's terminology. "I hate the term 'brain damaged'!" Marian Diamond argues. "We each have different kinds of brains; the connections are different, giving us different kinds of abilities. Give the young people the benefit of the doubt. . . we have different brains to develop and this is a positive connotation, not a negative one!" [13]

Whatever words may be most effective in getting people to realize that not all children learn in the same way, it is clear that environments play an important role in these differences. Later, we will return to some of Dr. Bernstein's opinions about how neural patterns are being "played out" for today's children. Now, however, we should finish our look at prenatal life by considering some of the specific factors that may alter these patterns of connectivity -- for better or worse. They fall generally into two categories: those that come in from outside, and those that are produced in the environment of the womb itself.

The Vulnerable Fetal Brain: "Birth Defects of the Mind"

The brain is always most plastic at times when it is growing fastest. The fetal brain is especially vulnerable, not only because of its increased metabolic rate, but also because of an underdeveloped ability to detoxify harmful substances. Not so many years ago, obstetricians earnestly assured their patients that the placenta was an effective screen for toxic materials, but they were wrong, as the thalidomide tragedies eventually demonstrated. We are now acutely aware that many toxins are able to cross the placenta. Because of its rapidly proliferating concentration of cells, the fetal brain is a natural target, and the systems growing fastest at the time of exposure are on the front line. [14]

Even toxic material that doesn't cross the placenta, such as residue from cigarette smoking, may accumulate in the placenta and disrupt the baby's nutritional intake. Many prospective fathers are unaware that they, too, can harm their unborn children. If they have been exposed to toxic substances, their contaminated seminal fluid may expose the fetus during intercourse or cause birth defects if toxins have damaged the genetic structure of the sperm. [15]

Because of the finely timed schedule of cell proliferation and migration, different effects may come from exposure at different times. Some are more obvious than others. Damage during the first few days of pregnancy usually results in spontaneous abortion, of which the mother is probably unaware. From one to eight weeks of gestation, when cells start to move toward their target destinations, fetal death or major abnormalities usually result. After eight weeks, when neurons begin to settle into place, toxic exposure may result in subtle rearrangements of their placement or with their potential ability to communicate. These seemingly minor structural and functional abnormalities have aroused growing concern from a group of scientists in the new field of behavioral teratology: the study of the effects of toxic substances on the developing brain. These researchers are convinced of the potential of teratogens, or toxins, to cause subtle but pervasive difficulty with learning and behavior -- the type of problems that, even years later, earn some children the label of "learning disabled." [16]

"Yes, it's a serious problem. There are clear links between substances commonly found in the environment and later development of learning and behavior difficulties," says Dr. Brenda Eskenazi of the departments of Maternal and Child Health and Epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley. "You might call these 'birth defects of the mind.' The effects on the brain are so subtle they don't show up on routine screening measures, and it may be years before the problem gets identified." [17]

Most such problems are of three major types: motor clumsiness and/or perceptual difficulties; problems with attention; or disabilities in specific types of school learning such as reading or math. As Dr. Bernstein pointed out, while it is sometimes hard to understand how prenatal exposure can show up only years later in school, early damage to higher-order systems may not become apparent until those particular systems are called on, as, for example, in reading comprehension or math reasoning. Since exposure to toxins after birth may also invite subtle forms of damage, causality is hard to pin down.

Hazardous Substances for the Fetal Brain

What are the hazardous substances? Although many potential candidates have been identified, conclusive results from well-controlled testing are few and far between. Here is a summary of the current field:

Lead: Clearly implicated in mental retardation, lead exposure both before and after birth has been shown to lower IQ even in potentially gifted children as well as causing problems with attention and academic learning. Yet the source of the problem may go unrecognized. Dr. Herbert L. Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is convinced that many children who have real learning and behavior difficulties in the classroom look "fine" when examined in a doctor's office. He estimates that as many as 650,000 American children may be affected. Authorities all over the world are beginning to share this concern. [18]

Other metals: Methyl mercury, arsenic, aluminum, and cadmium have all been implicated, particularly when combined with exposure to other toxins or with lead.

PCBs, PBBs, solvents, pesticides, and some chemical fertilizers: All contain ingredients that may affect the central nervous system. The presence of these substances in many work environments has resulted in new precautions and some regulations concerning exposure for people of childbearing age.

Recreational drugs: Alcohol may cause serious abnormalities in both mental and physical development or may exacerbate the effects of other toxins. The level of susceptibility appears to vary widely among individuals, and it is not known how to determine what amount, if any, is safe for anyone person. Narcotics known to be toxic to the developing brain are heroin, methadone, and codeine. Most research on marijuana is out-of-date and poorly controlled; new studies suggest extreme caution by both potential mothers and fathers. [19] Likewise, many authorities warn that growing cocaine use by pregnant women will soon flood the schools with children who have attention, learning, and social problems. In all, drugs taken during pregnancy are producing a substantial subpopulation of children who begin life with significant neurological impairment. At this writing, it is estimated that at least one out of every nine babies born in the United States is affected. [20] And these children are not even included in our already declining test scores!

Prescription drugs: Prospective parents are advised to discuss potential childbearing with a well-informed physician who can advise them on current information regarding any medication they may be taking.

Over-the-counter drugs: Experts advise completely avoiding these during pregnancy.

When I began to investigate this topic for an article I was asked to write recently, [21] I found myself horrified by what I read and heard from experts in the field. Everywhere I looked, I could see (or breathe, or ingest) substances that were under investigation. How did my husband and I ever manage, I wondered, to have three healthy, well-functioning children? I procrastinated about writing the article, partially because I was worried about frightening expectant parents, yet I became increasingly convinced that this information should be promulgated. Finally, I placed another call to Dr. Eskenazi, who had mentioned the fact that she was expecting her first child. I asked her how she reconciled her own pregnancy with her extensive knowledge about hazards to her child's developing brain.

"You have to use common sense," she replied. "Even knowing everything I do, I don't get hysterical. I just maintain sensible precautions. I read labels and avoid situations where I might be exposed to toxins. I would certainly advise women to clean up their environments and their lifestyles before becoming pregnant, and then just be careful and relax as much as possible." [22]

This is good advice, but to what extent does our society help women "use common sense" or even inform them clearly about the issues involved? Where is the research that will clarify the dimensions of this worldwide problem? At every teacher workshop I attend these days, I am asked, "Do you think that drugs or medications taken by parents may be related to the rash of attention problems we are now seeing in schools?" Although I am convinced there are a number of other forces playing into children's attention problems, I am obliged to respond, "Yes, according to the research, it is certainly a factor."

One group of teachers in California, alarmed by newspaper reports about neurotoxic effects of crop spraying, wanted to know what connection it might have to an increasing number of diagnosed learning disabilities in their district. They are not the only ones wishing for better answers to questions like these. In recent testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Audrey McMahon of the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities appealed for increased research on this global problem, the threat of which, she points out, does not end when the child is born. The brains of young children remain highly susceptible. Contaminants come from a multiplicity of sources, such as air pollution, automobile exhaust, foods that have been sprayed with pesticides, clothing worn by adults in a contaminated workplace, and even breast milk that has absorbed toxins stored in the mother's body fat. During the course of my interviews, a doctor in Germany told me that he and other physicians are advising women who live near the Rhine River, which has been heavily contaminated with pesticides and industrial residues, not to nurse their babies for more than a few weeks. [23]

The Stressed-Out Fetus

Toxins are not the only influences by which the fetal brain can be altered. A mother's illness and accident pose obvious risks. Recently we have also become aware of the importance of her nutritional and emotional status. It is encouraging to learn that these two variables are themselves doubled-edged swords that give parents some control over the general course of their baby's prenatal life. A sensible, balanced diet containing reasonable amounts of protein during pregnancy is a powerful protective factor against other risks. On the other hand, fetal brains are affected by malnutrition, and poorly nourished women also tend to give birth to children of low birthweight, who are statistically more at risk for learning problems. [24]

In today's fast-paced society, the subject of maternal stress is an issue that warrants better research. Animal studies have shown that stress during pregnancy can upset chemical transmission systems in the brain of the fetus, [25] possibly because hormone secretions associated with stress cross the placenta. One recent rat study from Israel demonstrated that "random" stress during pregnancy (i.e., the pregnant animal was exposed to loud noise or flashing lights on an unpredictable schedule) not only caused increased fearfulness and exaggerated stress response in the offspring, but also produced chemical brain changes resulting in permanent alterations in the relative size and shape of the two halves of the offsprings' brains. [26] (Is this an animal analogue for "different learning styles"?)

Published reports by several authorities have suggested that sustained stress during the first months of pregnancy may be a factor in the development of hyperactivity in children, but the professional literature does not offer any definitive guidelines. Expectant mothers are well advised to avoid prolonged, excessive stress if they possibly can -- although available definitions of what constitutes stress, or what "excessive" means for any individual woman, are frustratingly vague. [27]

The Flexible Mind: Overcoming Prenatal Damage

Before we move on to consider the way brains develop after birth, let me digress for a note of reassurance. The idea that brains can get changed around like this is a bit less frightening if we consider the point that everyone is "brain different" in some respect. Many children emerge apparently unscathed from difficult pre- and postnatal environments, while others end up "learning disabled."

There are doubtless several reasons for these different outcomes. First, environments continue to modify the brain long after birth, so their effects can actively counteract prenatal problems. Moreover, some children just seem to be genetically more resilient than others. Good prenatal nutritional and emotional environments provide additional insurance. Finally, because of the young brain's great structural and functional plasticity, it can arrange itself around some types of learning in a wide variety of ways, depending not only on innate predispositions but also on the way the material is presented.

Most school learning calls on many sets of connections, not just a single location in the brain, so some types of prenatal "damage" may be circumvented by later learning experiences. For example, youngsters learning to read by either sounding out words ("b-a-t") or by guessing at them from their general shape ("STOP") are using different systems of neurons in each case. Later, when they move on to rapid reading and comprehension of more complex material, they will connect up with higher-level systems. Thus, skilled reading is said to be "subserved" by a number of different combinations of brain cells in different locations. Some are obviously more critical than others (the ones that put the sounds together with the letters, for example), but it is possible to circumnavigate areas of weakness. Even without big "holes" in our brains, most of us have had to learn to compensate for certain sets of connections that don't hook up quite as easily as others! If you contemplate the potential arrangement and rearrangement of several billions (or hundreds of billions ) of nerve cells, you get a notion of the infinite number of ways in which a system can get arranged.

If some kinds of damage happen early enough, this flexibility, teamed with a drive to succeed and the help of a supportive environment, can generate seemingly miraculous results. One of the most remarkable stories I have recently heard was from Dr. Isabelle Rapin of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. One of her patients was a girl who had been born with, quite literally, a "hole" in her brain -- a large defect in the right rear quadrant of her cortex. Looking at an early brain (CT) scan of this child, which showed several distortions in addition to the large "empty" area, I had trouble believing she could ever have approached normal functioning. Yet, although she had some enduring visual problems, slow motor development, and trouble doing math, her verbal IQ registered in the superior range by the time she was nine years old. [28] When Dr. Rapin told me about this case, the girl was a student doing well at a well-known Ivy League university.

Some very specific types of damage or deprivation may noticeably effect basic "hard-wired" abilities, such as sensory discriminations (e.g., seeing visual features like vertical or horizontal lines; hearing certain kinds of sounds) because they are "localized" to very specific cells in the brain. Areas controlling attention and some related "executive functions" that will become important in later life (and in later chapters of this book) may also be vulnerable to early damage or deprivation. Many higher-level skills, however, can be approached in several different ways and thus may develop through more variable routes.

In his important book, Frames of Mind, Dr. Howard Gardner has suggested that separate types of intelligence call on many different brain areas. [29] A person may be highly gifted and have a wonderful memory in linguistic (language) intelligence, for example, but be unexceptional at music or interpersonal relationships. We can't draw a neat circle around any of these clusters in the brain, yet the various abilities within each seem somehow to work together. Specific skills within each cluster are developed at different stages of brain growth during childhood and adolescence.

Because the organization of the brain is so heavily influenced by the way it is used after birth, the home and school environment can do a lot to help potentially learning-disabled children learn more successfully. For example, as I have described in my previous book, a child's exposure to good language, a positively structured environment, and methods of instruction appropriate for his or her style of learning may determine whether learning problems materialize. [30] Moreover, the potential of teaching techniques to reorganize young brains is a hot new topic in the education world. We will see in a later chapter how one researcher claims to be changing brain function of reading-disabled schoolchildren with different teaching methods.

While the exact effect of brain-endangering substances remains undetermined, most of the academically injurious changes observed in today's children are probably much more a function of mental environments after birth. Fortunately, parents and teachers can actively do something about these influences. But they need to proceed wisely.

Engineering the Fetal Brain

Some people are in a real hurry to get started teaching their children. An increasingly popular attempt to "stimulate" brains artificially while they are in the womb is worrying many professionals.

"A lot of crazy, bizarre things are happening in the United States," reports Dr. Susan Luddington-Hoe, professor of maternal and child health at UCLA and author of How to Have a Smarter Baby. [31] ''There are now over fourteen programs for prenatal learning! Pregnant women are wearing belts with stereo headsets to try and stimulate their infant's brain. Some people are even holding a card with, say, an a on it to Mom's belly and shining a flashlight through it while they say 'a, a, a' so the kid will supposedly be born knowing the alphabet. Let me tell you, I don't condone any of this stuff."

During a normal pregnancy, the fetus receives a great deal of stimulation from the mother's and its own movement, from the sound of her voice and heartbeat, and even from the taste and smell of the amniotic fluid. Although scientists -- and mothers -- confirm that a fetus can respond to some external events, notably sounds, organized "learning" by fetal brains has a rather tenuous base in research. Studies have demonstrated that infant animals acquire preferences for tastes and odors in utero. [32] One researcher claims that human infants, while still in the womb, learn to prefer their mothers' voices and can even be "taught" to favor certain familiar stories that the expectant mother has frequently read out loud. [33] Dr. Luddington- Hoe's research has suggested that a fetus can differentiate its parents' voices immediately after birth.

Reports such as these have provoked a rash of commercial materials with which parents may attempt to create designer brains in their infants. There is even a "Prenatal University" for those who can't wait to get started paying college tuition.

"For heaven's sake," exclaims Dr. Luddington-Hoe, "nature has created the perfect environment; why should we mess around with it?"

Most responsible researchers agree that we do not yet know enough to do anything that risks distorting the natural processes of mental growth. Trying to "engineer" children's learning at any age can have disastrous emotional and neurological consequences.

The evolutionary history of our species has given us a neural architecture preprogrammed with a driving need to arrange itself adaptively. If a fetal brain is cared for and protected in following its own developmental timetable, it will emerge at the end of nine months ready to take on the challenge of molding itself around the demands of an awaiting -- and constantly changing -- world. We will now begin to examine this process.

[admin]

CHAPTER 3: Malleable Minds: Environment Shapes Intelligence

At birth, the average newborn brain weighs a mere 330 grams, one-fourth of adult weight. By the time the child is two years old, its weight will triple, and by age seven its 1,250 grams will represent 90% of adult weight. Meanwhile, however, it is losing neurons as the internal competition intensifies and cell groups consolidate into more efficient systems. How does this growth occur? To this question both animal and human research have provided some useful and provocative answers.

THE YOUNG PLASTIC BRAIN

As both animal and human brains grow, three things happen that account for their increased size and efficiency. First, dendrites sprout many new branches and grow heavier as they reach out to receive messages and develop synaptic connections. Second, supporting glial cells increase in number. Both of these developments appear to respond directly to the types of stimulation sent in by the environment.

In addition, the axons, or output parts of neurons, gradually develop a coating of a waxy substance called myelin, which insulates the wiring and facilitates rapid and clear transmission. At birth, only the most primitive systems, such as those needed for sucking, have been coated with myelin, or myelinated. Myelin continues to develop slowly all during childhood and adolescence in a gradual progression from lower- to higher-level systems. Its growth corresponds to the ability to use increasingly higher-level mental abilities. The process of myelination in human brains is not completed at least until most of us are in our twenties and may continue even longer. While animal studies have shown that total myelin may reflect levels of stimulation, scientists believe its order of development is mainly predetermined by a genetic program.

While the system, overall, is remarkably responsive to stimulation from the environment, the schedule of myelination appears to put some boundaries around "appropriate" forms of learning at any given age. Before we go on to consider the exciting implications of the fact that environments can make brains grow, we should stop for a moment to discuss some potential hazards in trying too hard to "make" intelligence or learning happen. Some of the skill deficits of today's schoolchildren, in fact, may have resulted from academic demands that were wrong -- either in content or in mode of presentation -- for their level of development.

Forced Learning and Functional Mix-Ups

The same mentality that attempts to engineer stimulation for baby brains also tries to push learning into schoolchildren much like stuffing sausages. For example, some parents now wonder if their schools are any good if they don't start formal reading instruction, complete with worksheets, in preschool. Likewise, many schools have reading lists or advanced math courses for older children that look impressive but, being out of the reach of most of the students, convince them that reading or math are difficult and boring activities. I call this the "cosmetic curriculum" because it sounds impressive, but the learning is often, unfortunately, only skin deep.

Before brain regions are myelinated, they do not operate efficiently. For this reason, trying to "make" children master academic skills for which they do not have the requisite maturation may result in mixed-up patterns of learning. As we have seen, the essence of functional plasticity is that any kind of learning -- reading, math, spelling, handwriting, etc. -- may be accomplished by any of several systems. Naturally, we want children to plug each piece of learning into the best system for that particular job. If the right one isn't yet available or working smoothly, however, forcing may create a functional organization in which less adaptive, "lower" systems are trained to do the work.

As an example, I think of the many children we see in second and third grade who grip their pencil in the most peculiar ways; some crumple their fingers around it in weird arrangements that make letter formation difficult and cause their hands to tire quickly; some use the base of their fingers instead of the tips to guide the pencil so that the process of handwriting resembles a fencing match more than a fine motor activity; some clutch it in their fists like a weapon. Any teacher will tell you that trying to correct "habits" like these is an uphill -- and usually unsuccessful -- battle. The reason would seem to be that a strong network of synaptic connections has already formed around these maladaptive patterns, making them automatic and difficult to change because they are now built into the system. How much better if we had taken the time to teach it correctly the first time around!

Neuromotor development moves only gradually from "gross motor," large, global movements, to the smaller muscles farther away from the core of the body (in this case, from the palm out to the ends of the fingers). It is certainly easy to speculate that these children were given pencils and encouraged to write -- without sufficient help on proper pencil-holding technique -- before the appropriate motor areas were "ready." Thus they practiced and made this learning automatic in the brain areas that were most available at the time -- to their lasting discomfort.

Can such changes in motor patterns really cause brain changes? In several provocative studies, monkeys whose fingers had been amputated showed altered brain structure as they learned to use different manual patterns. More subtle but equally striking changes occurred simply from having monkeys tap repeatedly with one finger; the related brain areas developed heavier sets of connections. [1]

This sort of study is clearly impossible to conduct on humans, and though we have come a long way, we are far from fully understanding which cell combinations mediate most higher-level learning. The way a child learns to hold a pencil will doubtless assume less and less importance in the age of computer word processors (see Chapter 15), but the same principles of neural readiness may apply to higher-level skills, since they are the most experience-dependent of all. As an example, let's take the kind of reasoning needed for understanding (not just memorizing one's way through) higher-level math. Perhaps some readers of this book shared a common experience when they took algebra: many of us functioned adequately until we reached Chicago, where two planes insisted on passing each other every day in class. When it wasn't planes, it was trains or people digging wells or other situations that did not seem in any way related to graphs and equations of X, Y, and Z. Personally, I found that the more I struggled, the more confused I became, until, soon I was learning more confusion than algebra. Moreover, I began to believe I was pretty dumb. Was I developing what Herman Epstein calls "negative neural networks" (resistant circuitry) toward this worthy subject? [2]

Having fled from math courses at the first available opportunity, I have since talked to other adults who confided that, after a similar experience, they also avoided math until forced years later to take a required course in graduate school. At this point, their grownup brains discovered they actually liked this sort of reasoning, although they were still confused by the planes that meet over Chicago! I often wonder how many children decide they are "dumb" about certain subjects, when the truth is that someone simply laid on the learning too soon in a form other than the one they needed to receive it in at the time. Thus they were cheated of the chance to learn it in an appropriately challenging and satisfying way.

In this personal example, it is very possible that the necessary neural equipment for algebra -- taught in this particular manner -- may not yet have been automatically available in my early-adolescent brain. The areas to receive the last dose of myelin are the association areas responsible for manipulating highly abstract concepts -- such as symbols (X, Y, Z; graphs) that stand for other symbols (numerical relationships) that stand for real things (planes, trains, wells). Such learning is highly experience-dependent, and thus there are many potential neural routes by which it can be performed. Trying to drill higher-level learning into immature brains may force them to perform with lower-level systems and thus impair the skill in question. Since every child's developmental schedule may be different for every type of learning (e.g., some get better at math faster than at English and vice versa), this concept of plasticity makes teaching a challenging task indeed.

I would contend that much of today's school failure results from academic expectations for which students' brains were not prepared -- but which were bulldozed into them anyway. Deficits in everything from grammar to geography may be caused by teaching that bypasses the kind of instruction that could help children conceptually come to grips with the subject at hand.

The brain grows best when it is challenged, so high standards for children's learning are important. Nevertheless, curriculum needs to be considered in terms of brain-appropriate challenge. Reorganizing synapses is much more difficult than having the patience to help them get arranged properly the first time around!

Teachers and parents can prime children's brains for complex learning, but no one knows yet (if they ever will) how to "make" maturation happen. We don't, so far, know how to make myelin grow in human brains, although impoverished environments and inadequate intake of protein may stunt its development. The relatively fixed order of myelinization in different brain areas may provide a real biological basis for "readiness" for certain types of learning. [3] Even if we wanted one, there is no prescription for maturing brains -- much to some parents' dismay.

Not long ago, a father of a teenage son blurted out a question in the middle of a lecture I was giving to a parents' group in an affluent suburb. "My son is fourteen now and he's been accused of being an 'immature late bloomer' by his teachers ever since kindergarten," he lamented. "Is there any place where I can buy myelin?" The audience laughed, and so did I. Many of us have done battle in that particular trench, but maturation is not so easily purchased. What is presented to the growing brain may indeed enrich it in many important respects, but the good intentions of adults who try too hard to manipulate the process can easily backfire.

Looking Inside the "Enriched Brain": What Works?

How, then, do we stimulate growing brains appropriately? And what can cause them to change for the better? In seeking an answer to these big questions, we can start once more in the rat laboratories, where, as visitors, we would observe colonies of rats living in very different types of cages. Although all get the same rations of food and water, some rats enjoy "enriched" environments while others live either in standard laboratory or "impoverished" conditions for mental growth. The "enriched" animals have larger cages and more playmates, but most important, they are also surrounded by toys such as wheels and balls, which they are busily investigating, pushing, rolling, and climbing through. These two variables -- companionship and active involvement with toys -- differentiate between "enriched" and "impoverished" conditions. According to Dr. Diamond, these environmental variations can change the size of the cortex by as much as 11%.

Other researchers have theorized that the areas maturing fastest at the time of stimulation are the ones in which the most growth is found. Thus, in a complex human brain, the same type of stimulation might affect different skills, depending on the brain's stage of development.

What happens to cells in the "enriched" brains? Dr. Mark Rosenzweig and Dr. Michael Renner, who started their work in Dr. Diamond's laboratory, describe several effects, "including changes in gross weight of the brain, weight and thickness of the cerebral cortex, microscopic changes in cell density and relative proportions of different cell types, and changes in the structure of individual neurons." [4]

Curiously enough, Rosenzweig has found that rats in the impoverished condition (IC) actually gain more in body weight than their counterparts in enriched condition (EC). Yet their brains are inferior in many respects, two of which are particularly significant. First, as Marian Diamond has shown, there are many more glial support cells in the enriched brains, and second, the neurons themselves have more dendrite spines and thus, presumably, more synapses. [5]

In another lab, Dr. William Greenough, also considering differences between groups of enriched and deprived rats, found differences in synapses as great as 20-25% in one area of the cortex. This finding, he says, "led us to consider what similar extremes might result if all neurons in the human brain were equally plastic. The difference of about 2,000 synapses per neuron in the rat would translate into many trillions of synapses on the 100-200 billion neurons of the human brain!'' [6] Although, as we shall shortly see, the mere existence of many synapses does not necessarily mean "smarter," this potential for change is indeed impressive.

The critical question is, of course, do these changes in brains have effects on learning? Yes, indeed, say Rosenzweig and Renner, particularly on higher-level skills. "In problem-solving tasks," they report, "the more complex the task, the greater the likelihood that EC-IC differences will be found. In these tests, the primary sites of environmentally induced anatomical plasticity are in those regions of the brain associated with the more complex (and presumably higher-level) cognitive functions, [particularly] higher-level problem-solving skills." Moreover, even when not being tested, the behavior of the enriched rats is more active and organized when they are exploring new situations. They appear to be picking up more and different information during exploration as a result of their lively curiosity.

As a teacher, I invariably think of some of my students when I read studies like these. We must always be cautious, however, in applying such research to human learning. First, while facts about nervous system development can be extrapolated from one set of neurons and glia to another, it is quite another matter to start drawing parallels between animal and human behavior in complex learning situations. Second, while these environments clearly differed from each other, none of them approximated a rat's natural habitat. It is rare to find a human situation as "impoverished" as the IC cages, although in a later chapter I will describe the effects on a human child of one that might be considered comparable. Even the "enriched" environments are less stimulating than those in nature where rats are constantly exposed to the real challenges of living in a free environment, finding food, defending themselves, and moving about when and where they wish. Animals growing up "in the wild" in the Berkeley hills outside Dr. Diamond's laboratory tend to have larger and heavier cortexes than do those raised in the cages.

The basic principles of plasticity have been shown to be constant across such species as mice, gerbils, ground squirrels, dogs, cats, and primates (e. g., monkeys, Japanese macaques). What can we learn from animal research about how to stimulate children appropriately? Many studies support the notion that brains -- and the organisms attached to them -- tend to gravitate to the types of stimulation that they need at different stages of development. If we encourage children to make choices from a selected variety of available challenges, both environmental and intellectual, we are no doubt following the wisest course.

Whose Brain Is Growing Today?

Another lesson from animal research is the importance of active involvement and interest on the part of the animal. For example, Dr. Diamond and others have found that to keep the enriched rats' brains growing, they must frequently change their toys to keep them curious and interested. In another experiment, simply having rats climb over a pile of toys to get their food caused visual areas of the cortex to increase 7%. [7]

Greenough agrees. "It appears that active interaction with the environment is necessary for the animal to extract very much appropriate information. Merely making visual experience of a complex environment available to animals unable to interact with it has little behavioral effect." In support of the latter point, animals have been placed in small cages inside the enrichment cage so they can watch their brothers and sisters play, although they cannot themselves get at the toys. The brains of the spectators end up not much different from those of animals in impoverished cages.

As well-intentioned parents and teachers, we all sometimes end up taking charge of learning and trying to "stuff" in rather than arranging things so that the youngster's curiosity impels the process. Since I began reading this research, I often ask myself when I am struggling to "make" a student learn something, Whose brain is growing today? It always helps to consider: Who is interested? Who is curious? Who is asking the questions? Children need stimulation and intellectual challenges, but they must be actively involved in their learning, not responding passively while another brain -- their teacher's or Parent's -- laboriously develops new synapses in their behalf!

Any activity which engages a student's interest and imagination, which sparks the desire to seek out an answer, or ponder a question, or create a response, can be good potential brain food. Particularly in an age when we need "enriched" minds to grapple with increasingly complex problems, we should not encourage, or even condone, large doses of passive observing or absorbing for growing brains. Yet it is happening -- not only in front of the TV, but in too many day-care centers, schools, after-school activities, and even in homes. How much does this learner passivity contribute to lagging academic skills? A great deal!

In the only human "enrichment" study she has done, Dr. Diamond compared sections from the brain of Albert Einstein with similar sections from average males. She found cellular enhancement of the same types that she had seen in her enriched rats. [8] In one particular area that makes higher-level associations between sensory systems, there were actually twice as many glial cells! She speculates that this unusual profusion could have resulted not only from inherited potential, but also from unusually active use of those particular cell groups.

CRITICAL PERIODS FOR LEARNING

What happens if the "right" stimulation is not available when the brain is ready for it? Are there certain times when the brain is more open to certain kinds of experience? When, if ever, is it too late to learn specific skills? Some of the most eye-opening research on neural plasticity shows that there are "critical," "sensitive," or "optimal" periods for some types of mental development. But if the right stimulus isn't available ... too bad.

"In development it is now well known that there are certain times when an organism is ready to deal with certain stimuli," states Dr. Jane Holmes Bernstein. "And when those stimuli do not appear at the critical time, then it is likely that the brain structures that would have mediated them will not function and will die." [9]

Both animal and human data support this real-life phenomenon of use it or lose it. In order to understand its implications, we should first delve more deeply into the way by which the brain naturally hones itself into an efficient processing system.

Synaptic Pruning: What Gets Shaved and What Gets Saved?

Since an infant enters the world with more neurons than will ever be needed, the brain starts life in quite a disorganized state. Baby neurons that have survived the prenatal marathon to reach synaptic sites are already competing to reach out to other neurons by growing new dendrite spines. It will take many years -- perhaps even a lifetime -- for each brain's complement of synapses to form and become strengthened by repeated use. Particularly during the early years, the ones that get used are the ones that will be strengthened and survive. A major task during the years of childhood is to prune this mass of potential into networks of connections that are useful and automatic for the mental skills that this particular child is being encouraged to develop.

You might envision the newborn brain as a large mass of clay that has been formed in a rough template of a final product. On it, the environment acts as a sculptor. The types of stimulation that enter the brain determine to a great extent which material remains and which is shaved off and swept away from the studio door. During sensitive periods, certain areas in the mass are temporarily warmed and softened, thus becoming more amenable to the environmental sculptor's knife.

This process proceeds quite automatically for the most part. Since the child can't possibly process all the available stimuli, he or she selects what is most interesting or personally relevant, thus building connections in the related brain systems. Adults' main task is to make a variety of stimulation available, at the same time considering carefully the choices their children are encouraged to make. Brains of youngsters who spend lots of time in front of a TV set, for example, may be expected to develop differently from those who pursue the physical, interpersonal, and cognitive challenges of active play. Children with plenty of time to "waste" can be encouraged to seek out activities that are appropriate for an individual brain's stage of development. Youngsters who are hurried from one activity to another may get lots of sensory input but be shortchanged on the time-consuming process of forming association networks to understand and organize experience meaningfully.

The pruning of many synapses is necessary to keep the child's mind from resembling a "booming, buzzing, confusion." Neuroanatomist Dr. Arnold Scheibel once described the immature brain as somewhat like a large tree crowded with many little birds, all singing weakly at the same time so that no individual song can clearly be heard. As the brain matures, gradually eliminating some connections and retaining others, the tree contains fewer but larger birds with strong, clear songs, well separated so that each can distinctly be heard. [10]

Although it seems logical to believe that the more neurons the better, this is not the case. The importance of pruning is demonstrated by studies that show some mentally retarded children have fewer synaptic connections than normal, while others have too many.

Researchers speculate that the retardation may be associated with the inefficiency of these overcrowded brains, although they unfortunately do not as yet know what to do about it.

Evidence for Critical Periods: Animal Research

The ground rules for plasticity often blur the line between efficiency and impairment. Evidence from both animals and humans shows that sometimes the brain's pruning mechanisms are carried too far.

What would the world be like if you could see everything -- except vertical lines? You would probably have a lot of trouble getting through doorways, and it would be difficult to avoid bumping into trees and telephone poles. This experience happened to some kittens who were kept in an unusual environment during a short period when particular groups of cells called "vertical feature detectors" in the visual cortex were "ripe." During this time, the kittens never saw vertical lines. Despite a full dose of visual stimulation and otherwise normal vision later on, they never learned to see them. Later examination of their brains showed that the neurons designed to do this job simply failed to develop because they received no stimulation during the critical period of their development. Many different experiments have been conducted with kittens wearing specially designed goggles or blindfolds. The upshot of all of them is that the selective restriction of certain types of stimulation can structurally alter the animals' brains. [11] Naturally, function is also affected. I find two facts particularly interesting:

-- Not only does severe visual deprivation result in changed neurons in the visual cortex, but it can also cause the auditory (hearing) cortex to develop more fully than would otherwise be expected.

-- Structural changes occurring during critical periods result in behavioral changes later on when their "changed brains" cause the animals to pay attention and respond differently to different aspects of the environment. [12]

Other animal studies, even including such species as birds, crickets, and goldfish, have demonstrated many types of sensitive periods. Sexual behavior of monkeys is later impaired if they are isolated during periods of normal sexual play during childhood. If mother cats do not bring live prey into the nest during a specific time frame, their kittens never develop the ability to become proficient hunters. In each of these cases, certain parts of the nervous system did not develop normally, and stimulation before or after the critical period does not have the same effect.

One interesting experiment illustrates the fact that animals will "work" for their stimulation when the critical period strikes. Kittens were reared in a dark room that contained a lever they could push to view a lighted scene especially designed to stimulate certain sets of visual "feature detectors." Before the onset of a critical period for this type of vision at about eight weeks of age, they occasionally depressed the lever but showed little interest in it, although their eyes had already opened. Suddenly, between eight and nine weeks, the relevant cells became "ripe" and action at the lever increased "dramatically." [13] We can assume the number of dendrites and synapses on those particular cells in their brains grew apace.

"Sensitive" Periods for Human Brains

Human brains have much bigger windows of opportunity because they take much longer to develop than do those of animals, so the terms "sensitive" or "optimal" periods are usually used. Studies to date have identified sensitive periods for two general types of abilities: basic sensory skills and higher-level ones, specifically some aspects of language.

Priming the Foundation Systems

Even when a child's ears and eyes are completely intact, visual and auditory processing may be impaired if cells in the parts of the brain that receive signals from these organs fail to fire during a particular time of development. A well-publicized example is the problem called lazy eye, or amblyopia. In this disorder, a young child fails to develop binocularity, the ability to use both eyes together efficiently, because one eye tends to wander, letting the other do all the work. Because the brain cells designed to receive the visual signals from the lazy eye do not get their proper dose of stimulation, they eventually stop firing. Doctors have learned that this condition must be treated before age five, if it is to be corrected, because the sensitive period for this particular ability may end at that time. The treatment, logically, consists of intermittently patching the good eye to force all cells in the system to do their work, develop their synapses, and survive. The same principle explains why cataracts on the eyes of infants must be removed before six months of age to avoid permanent visual impairment.

Still at a basic sensory level, the ability to discriminate fine differences between sounds of a language apparently must develop during early years, as well. An eighth grader I met recently simply could not "hear" the differences between some of the short vowel sounds and thus had trouble saying and writing them accurately. Her classmates thought that her substitutions, such as "osculator" for "escalator," were "cute," but her teachers were not similarly amused by her spelling mistakes. Sure enough, I discovered she, like many students with both spelling and reading problems, had suffered from early ear infections that resulted in sporadic hearing loss during preschool years. Because of this link with later learning problems, experts now recommend that parents watch children carefully for blocked hearing and get prompt medical attention for such problems before cells in the auditory cortex are permanently impaired by lack of exercise. [14]

Circuits for the sounds of different languages must apparently be stimulated during a critical period, as well. Dr. Jennifer Buchwald of the UCLA School of Medicine is interested in the way "the acoustic -- that is, linguistic -- environment during development is responsible for developmental differences in the brain." She is studying such differences in native Japanese and American speakers by measuring a special type of electrical wave, called P300, in their brains. [14]

Her research explains why adults who learn to speak a foreign language with different sound patterns than their own rarely acquire a flawless accent. Their vocal apparatus is not the reason; their brains are. While they may think they hear or mimic the sounds accurately, they really have lost the ability to perceive sound patterns that were not present in the environments during childhood. The distinctive accents of European, Middle Eastern, or Oriental speakers of English, which often reveal their particular national origins, provide living verification of the power of early environments to create lasting differences in some types of human abilities.

Does this justify teaching Japanese to infants -- another current fad among the child-engineering group? At a recent conference Dr. Nico Spinelli responded with an interesting observation. "I think growing up bilingually wastes real estate in the brain. A better plan, in my opinion, would be for children to learn to pronounce perfectly fifty or so words of, say, German, French, Japanese, and Spanish. Later on, one or more of these languages could be learned more easily and with no accent, because the brain would have been primed for it." [15] Before parents rush for their foreign language dictionaries, however, I would like to reiterate the fact that any learning that has to be "pushed" into a child may end up doing more harm than good -- for many reasons. Moreover, there is also evidence that the wrong kinds of foreign language input may tangle up the wires of some children for their native tongue. Caution is advised!

It seems logical that hard-wired sensory skills might have sensitive periods of development. But what about the type of association area brainwork that requires the integration of many different -- and sometimes widely separated -- neural systems? A few studies have been conducted which suggest that to develop active, intelligent responses to the world, a child needs specific types of interaction with caretakers at different times in development. For example, separate studies have shown that in normal children, direct kinesthetic (muscular) stimulation (e.g., parent moves child's arms or legs) is maximally effective during the first six months; maternal prompting ("Look at the bunny," "See the red fire engine") is more effective at some times than at others; and maternal gesturing has been positively related to comprehension in nineteen-month-olds but not in older children. [16] In the next chapter we will look at other ways in which "higher-order" skills such as language and attention may be affected by experience during specific times of development.

"NEURAL DARWINISM" IN THE COMPETITIVE BRAIN

Probably the most intriguing idea emerging from all this research is that brains are shaped and maintained by internal competition. The creative drama of neurons' endless battle, first for survival and later for connective power, is still not familiar to most people outside the research laboratories. Even many of those within the labs have trouble grasping implications of a major new theory proposed by Nobel Prize winner Dr. Gerald Edelman of Rockefeller University. His book, Neural Darwinism, outlines in complete detail what might be considered the ultimate argument for the environment's power in shaping the brain. [17]

In his theory and with "Darwin III," a computer that can replicate some aspects of human brain function in surprisingly lifelike ways, Edelman applies the laws of natural selection to the neurons in the human brain -- and finds that they work. He first acknowledges, as we have already seen, that there are overall patterns of brain structure that are modified by genetic and prenatal history; in addition, he proposes a group of "secondary repertoires," formed only by stimuli to which a particular brain responds during its lifetime. In this constantly changing system, groups of neurons are locked in constant competition with each other to "capture" other cells for their group. The groups that get the most action grow stronger synapses, add to their networks, and survive; they are "selected" because they are more likely to be used in future behavior.

As long as significant activation is achieved, the group can continue to consolidate its "hold" on cells. But other groups are constantly competing for the same cells, and any weakening of connections because of decreased activation puts the group at risk either of losing a few cells or, in the extreme case, of being divided and conquered. [18]

Ultimately, through a process that he describes as "reentrant signaling," the cell groups link themselves together in a coordinated system that can talk to itself. These systems communicate back and forth, spurring on their own development as they respond to internal and external stimuli. Thus our brains evolve, individually and collectively, according to what is useful and adaptive for the particular environments in which we find ourselves.

Committing Growing Neurons ... to What?

Dr. Jane Holmes Bernstein is intrigued by Edelman's ideas. "It seems," she says, "the stimuli coming in are actually competing to have this brain take notice of them. When you're dealing with this idea of competition within the system, if those stimuli are not there at the right time, then the cells don't fire. The next set of stimuli coming in, competing madly for cortical connections, are likely to preempt what should have been a relationship in the cells."

But surely this doesn't mean that we're just helpless victims of whatever stimuli come along, does it?

Not at all, believes Dr. Bernstein. "It's not simply a matter of the stimuli being there; you have to do something with them." She describes a famous experiment in which identical-twin kittens were put in a large circular container painted with black and white vertical stripes -- their only visual stimulation during a critical period of visual development. One kitten rode in a small basket that was attached to one end of a revolving balance beam. The other kitten was in a second basket attached to the opposite end of the beam; his legs, however, protruded from the basket. As he walked around, the beam revolved and his brother got a free ride. Both, of course, had the same visual stimulation of the vertical stripes. Later, it was discovered that visual receptor cells in their brains had developed differently, even though each had experienced the exact same scenery. The kitten who merely rode along was functionally blind for vertical lines!

"Only the kitten who had his feet on the floor, knowing where he was, aware of his position on the floor relative to the lines, developed those connections!" emphasizes Dr. Bernstein. "Experience shapes brains, but you need to interact with the experience."

Physical play is one of the main ways in which children interact with experience, points out Dr. Bernstein. "The most characteristic thing about the human is that we go looking for problems to solve -- or in other words, playing. In fact, we usually worry about significant emotional issues in youngsters who are unable to look for problems to solve."

Before I left Dr. Bernstein's office I decided to get practical. If the brain responds physically to such environmental differences as whether a kitten walks or rides, what effects might today's environments -- where many children spend more time watching a screen than with their feet on the ground -- be having on mental abilities? What skills could they be gaining -- and which ones might they be losing?

"Well," she replied, "there's nothing wrong with TV or computers per se. However, it may be an issue whether the kids are active or passive when working with the machines. Sesame Street, for example, has brought a great deal of information to children who might not otherwise have got it, but this may have been obtained at a price. I hear many teachers complain that children in kindergarten and first grade don't know how to listen actively! They're used to fast-paced segments of information that are constantly changing. They should be doing something with what they're getting.

"The Sesame Street population is actually at the greatest risk for not understanding that language is communication, a back-and-forth interaction between people. They aren't personally involved in using language to think and solve problems with. Children who have been talked to and had stories read to them are at a real advantage. They've learned how to listen and pay attention -- and had fun doing it. These basic abilities are critical if a youngster is to benefit from education in the classroom!"

How about video games?

"In one very popular game, for example, children must learn to attend to increasingly complex clues. They're systematically encouraged to scan a visual array. But why not put a kid in a real-life problem-solving situation? This isn't being encouraged. We're not giving them the full range of opportunities and it's certainly possible that with such a degree of practice on one skill, the brain might commit too many cells and there would be fewer available for other things.

"Teachers worry about the amount of time children, even very young ones, spend these days encased in stereo headphones, listening to music instead of talking, reading or carrying on a conversation. What do you think that might be doing to their brains?" I asked Dr. Bernstein.

"I hate to think." She rolled her eyes.

"It seems as if we teachers have our work cut out for us," I ventured. "How much can schools change brains?"

Dr. Bernstein did not hesitate. "A great deal!" she replied emphatically.

IN A NUTSHELL: DEVELOPING BRAINS

Genes set the outlines of mental ability, but the way children use their brains determines how their intelligence is expressed. The experiences with which a child chooses to interact determine each brain's synaptic structure as well as the way it functions for different types of learning. If children change the way they use their brains, their synapses are rearranged accordingly. The more they are used in a certain pattern of response, the less flexible they appear to become.

Nature provides a schedule for neural maturation, and increasingly complex modes of thinking emerge from an internal competition for connections at each new phase of mental growth. If a child is glued to an activity for several hours a day, connections for that specific activity will be built up, but something else is going to be diminished. Moreover, if certain kinds of skills remain unused during their appearance on the brain's developmental stage, neural foundations may wither away in the wings of potentiality.

Severe deprivation can have dramatic effects on the young, malleable mind. Less extreme variations in experience have less predictable consequences. The value of excessive stimulation to enhance development is unproven and risky. External pressure designed to produce learning or intelligence violates the fundamental rule: A healthy brain stimulates itself by active interaction with what it finds challenging and interesting in its environment. The environments that we provide for children, the stimuli with which we encourage them to interact, and the ways in which we demonstrate for them the uses of a human mind -- these are the means at our command for shaping both their brains and our cultural future.

[admin]

Part Two: LANGUAGE, FUZZY THINKING, AND THE LANGUISHING LEFT HEMISPHERE

CHAPTER 4: Who's Teaching the Children to Talk?

Language is not only a means of generalization; it is at the same time the source of thought. When the child masters language he gains the potentiality to organize anew his perception, his memory; he masters more complex forms of reflection of objects in the external world; he gains the capacity to draw conclusions from his observations, to make deductions, the potentiality of thinking. -- ALEXANDER LURIA [1]

Language is not the garment but the incarnation of our thoughts. -- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Language is our most powerful tool for organizing experience and, indeed, for constituting our social realities. -- JEROME BRUNER [2]

Sitting facing the television, muttering half thoughts or reactions into black space -- this is the primary linguistic training ground for most of my students. It does not in any way adequately serve the goal of developing and strengthening verbal communication because there is no meaningful interaction. I have before me in my classroom a generation of youngsters whose world encourages linguistic passivity. I must build an awareness of the demands of clear verbal communication on the most rudimentary interpersonal levels. -- A. JANE HAMILTON, [3] MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER, HILLSBORO, NH

Language shapes culture, language shapes thinking -- and language shapes brains. The verbal bath in which a society soaks its children arranges their synapses and their intellects; it helps them learn to reason, reflect, and respond to the world. The brain is ravenous for language stimulation in early childhood but becomes increasingly resistant to change when the zero hour of puberty arrives. Severe deprivation of language during early years guarantees lasting neural changes that noticeably affect speech and understanding. More subtle forms of language deprivation do not show up in such dramatic ways, but may ultimately affect abilities to think abstractly, plan ahead and defer gratification, control attention, and perform higher-order analysis and problem-solving -- the very skills so much at issue in American schools today.

The brains of today's children are being structured in language patterns antagonistic to the values and goals of formal education. The culprit, which is now invading all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum, is diminished and degraded exposure to the forms of good, meaningful language that enable us to converse with others, with the written word, and with our own minds. The results are inevitable: declining literacy, falling test scores, faltering or circuitous oral expression, ineptitude with the written word that extends from elementary schools into the incoming ranks of professionals. Corporations run writing courses for budding executives, universities remediate basic skills, secondary schools lower standards, and elementary schools add more "learning disability" classes. Meanwhile bureaucrats and educational planners ignore the kernel problem and tout curriculum and methods devised for a previous generation. Bigger doses of "chalk and talk" are the weapons of choice against flagging attention, declines in reading comprehension, and superficial reasoning across the academic spectrum. But old methods are not working because young brains have not been shaped around language as a quintessential tool for analytic thinking.

If we want growing brains to build the foundations for traditional modes of academic excellence, we must confront the habits of our culture that are changing the quality and the quantity of our children's conversation -- both interpersonal and with the written word. Children immersed in what some linguists aptly term "primitive" language should not be criticized for failing to acquire linguistic sophistication.

Much of the blame inevitably falls on television, which is actually only one symptom of the problem. No one has defined long-term effects of stereo headphones versus conversation, of computer games or drills versus active social play, of videotapes versus books. How can children bombarded from birth by noise, frenetic schedules, and the helter-skelter caretaking of a fast-paced adult world learn to analyze, reflect, ponder? How can they use quiet inner conversations to build personal realities, sharpen and extend their visual reasoning? These qualities are embedded in brains by the experiences a society chooses for its children. What are we choosing for ours?

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, BRAIN: ARTIFACT AND ARCHITECT

According to many anthropologists, society, language, brain, and the human intellect have been shinnying together up the evolutionary pole since prehistoric times. Language in fact, has been both artifact and architect of our human intellectual habits. The development of speech probably was inevitable because the human brain and vocal apparatus are uniquely suited for it. After the first words emerged, perhaps as a guttural expedient for some primitive man who wanted to summon a comrade when he was clutching a handful of tools, people discovered that talk could be useful. As they developed various uses for language, say some authorities, human evolution could have been pushed along by several notches. In turn, as language was used, the underlying brain structures may have been nudged into increased size and specialization.

The invention of writing also changed thinking: Many scholars believe the precision required to get thought into words on paper refined mental capabilities, logical thought, and the ability of a culture to reason about its complexities. [4] Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that the substitution of immediate, pictorial material for the written word may be destroying our societal ability to reason intelligently. "In a culture dominated by print," he points out, "public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas." It is no accident that the Age of Reason coincided with the development of print. Now, however, the content of much public discourse has become "dangerous nonsense." The Gettysburg address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to an 1985 audience, he suggests, even if the President could have constructed such long, complex sentences! [5]

This "dangerous nonsense" is the introduction for large numbers of our young into the intellectual habits and values of adult society. It is also, for many, their primary linguistic model. From it, children get a window on adults' reasoning. "Language tells what a people thinks about itself and its destiny," maintains columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, but "television's abominable grammar has tarnished the beauty of the English language.'' [6]

Who Is Teaching Language to the Children?

Even if the linguistic quality of television were upgraded, however, the one-way nature of media talk makes it a poor teacher. Good language, like the synapses that make it possible, is gained only from interactive engagement: children need to talk as well as to hear. They need to play with words and reason with them. They need to practice talking about problems to learn to plan and organize their behavior. They need to respond to new words and stories to build a broad personal base of semantic meaning. They need personal adult guides to provide good examples of grammar -- not primarily so they will sound "intelligent," but because word order, or syntax, is the means by which they will learn to analyze ideas and reason about abstract relationships. They need to hear and speak the tiny units of language -- such as ed, ing, ment -- that convey fine-grained differences between what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow, between actions and things, between the shades of meaning that give clarity to mental operations.

Good conversation is a rara avis in homes today. We know that most children do not read, but as we shall see, they also get little conversational training at schools. Moreover, school experiences may come too late or be of the wrong type. Traditional sources of language exposure have ceded much of their neural real estate to television and the peer culture.

Normal human brains will construct the essentials of a language even without much input: categories of word meaning, sounds, basic grammar. Deaf children invent basic symbols and the grammar of a primitive sign language even when they are not taught to sign. The brain dictates that some language will be learned; the form of the language then determines, to some degree, the form of the brain. If the deaf continue to use a visual language, their brains become significantly different from those of hearing children.

For children in more normal language environments, a minimum of exposure during the specific time period when the brain is "sensitive" for each type of development guarantees the unfolding of basic "experience expectant" systems. Refinements of language, such as more complex grammar, vocabulary, and social usage, however, don't arrive so easily; they depend on the quality and quantity of interactions in both preschool and elementary years. The most complex neural systems, which pull together abstract language and visual reasoning, develop only if challenging encounters with reading, writing, and verbal reasoning continue during the teenage years. Failure to stimulate these systems, which enable many of mankind's greatest achievements, threatens not only personal but cultural futures.

FAMILIES, SCHOOLS, AND GROWING BRAINS: THE IDEAL CONFRONTS THE REALITY

Language at Home Helps Children Create "Possible Worlds"

The person who teaches your child to talk also teaches a way of thinking. The ideas, values, and priorities of a culture are borne along on the stream of language that flows between generations.

Teaching children to speak not only helps them organize words in a sentence but also to organize their minds, advises Dr. Jerome Bruner. Bruner feels the type of symbol systems we teach children to use open "possible worlds" for them. The way we talk about the world and think about it in the "coin of that thought," he maintains, imposes a point of view and even creates a social reality. Nations differ in large part because of symbol systems. "Just as the little Frenchman becomes a consumer and user of French modes of thinking and doing, so the little American comes to reflect the ways in which knowledge is gained and reflected on in America."

Verbal interactions in the home are where it all starts. In a simple example, if your child is angry because a friend made off with a favorite toy, the words you use and those you teach the child to use will set lasting patterns of action and attitude:

"Go kick that little monster in the butt! We don't let people get away with things like that!" (Society is violent, and you must be prepared to defend physically against any who transgress on your territory. Don't stop to talk or reason; just act.)

"Let me call John's mother and settle this problem." (The world can be managed by persons in authority. Words are used for solving problems, but it is best to wait for someone else who knows more than you to do the work.)

"Let's go to John's house and you can tell him why you're upset. Hitting isn't going to do any good." (People are expected to take the responsibility for solving their own problems. Verbal negotiation is the accepted means.)

"Please be quiet; this program's almost over ... " (Television problems are more important than real-life ones. Words don't seem to do much good, better try another way to get attention.)

Not all children have parents or caregivers who show them how to use words effectively, but these habits strongly influence the child's "possible worlds" when he gets to school. Dr. Gordon Wells, of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, has studied variations in the types of language training children get at home. "Everything that happens in a child's daily life is a potential subject for the sort of talk that facilitates attention, interpretation, and evaluation, but parents differ in the use they make of these opportunities," he observes. "In some homes, events are very much taken for granted, each one receiving the same sort of passing comment, whereas in other homes there is a much greater selectivity, some events being discussed in considerable detail and connections made with the wider context in which they occur." [7]

Social as well as thinking skills develop from children's language experiences, believes Dr. Bambi Schieffelin of the Department of Anthropology at New York University. "I think language is the thing that creates one's whole world view," she emphasizes. "I take a strong position that it's the structure of language that is important -- you can use language to create worlds as well as teach how to think." [8, 9]

The Importance of Talk

Dr. Schieffelin, like many others, is concerned that children are not receiving large enough daily doses of talk either at home or at school. With increasing numbers of young children spending time in day-care or school settings, we must pay special attention to their need to talk to adults and to each other, she insists. "I just believe that kids talking and having language experiences of all kinds, in any kind of medium, is just critical. Kids have to talk, they should be encouraged constantly to talk, and older people need to participate with them, guide them, help them develop and expand their abilities."

Many parents today try hard to provide elaborate "stimulating" environments for their children, but not even designer toys substitute for good-quality conversation. Looking specifically at the behavior of the mothers in one typical study, researchers found that "frequent, responsive mother-child language interaction" was the most critical factor in raising mental ability, rather than "overall level of maternal stimulation," i.e., how well the mother physically cared for the child. [10]

A child's early experiences with language have powerful long-term effects on school achievement. Studies of homes of children with Down's syndrome show that parent-child interaction with language can improve the future school abilities even of children viewed as "retarded." By providing parents with training in language-rich "play lessons" beginning when each child was thirty months old, researchers in one study found that ensuing gains in the youngsters' reading comprehension lasted for at least ten years. [11]

Dr. Catherine Snow of Harvard University is conducting a large study to find out which characteristics of family life are particularly related to language development and -- by extension -- to school success. Some language skills, she finds, are much more valuable than others in academic terms: For example, children who can come up with good original definitions for words (as in "What does 'donkey' mean?") tend to do well on standardized achievement tests. But ability to mimic the behavior of a talk-show host interviewing an adult for four minutes showed no relationship to success on the tests.

The quality of the conversation adults have with children is extremely important, says Dr. Snow. In those precious times together at the dinner table, for example, parents who take the time to discuss topics thoughtfully, who talk about events and ideas, are helping their children become much better thinkers than those who focus more on the food or the situation at hand. Telling stories over and over, expanding on characters, events, and ideas, also helps children learn to think carefully and give good explanations.

The Importance of Words Without Pictures

Any activity that helps children use their brains to separate from the "here and now," to get away from pictures and use words to manipulate ideas in their own minds, also helps them with the development of abstract thinking (e.g., "Let's guess what we will see when we go to the park this afternoon." "I wonder what your coach's decision will mean for next year's team."). Many experts believe this kind of "dis-embedded thought" is encouraged by reflective conversations about stories that have been read. Families with the time and patience to talk thoughtfully with their children about the stories they read give them a big advantage in school. Such activities are a difficult chore when parents are rushed or tired, however. Who has the energy after a day full of hassles?

Nevertheless, if parents expect their children to be good students, they had better be prepared to make an effort. If they are too tired to talk, they can at least read aloud from books that engage children's interest and attention. In a large' study in Great Britain following children from preschool into elementary school, Dr. Wells and his colleagues found that the most powerful predictor of their school achievement was the amount of time spent listening to interesting stories. Wells believes that such experiences teach children first about the way stories (and later, other things they read) are structured, as well as the types of language that may be expected in a variety of types of written text. Even more important, however, is understanding words alone as the main source of meaning. Because the words do not come with pictures attached, the child must come to grips with "the symbolic potential of language" -- its power to represent experience independent of the context of the here and now.

Experiences with pictures attached, even when they involve looking at picture books and learning new words, are not as valuable, says Wells, because the child needs to learn "sooner, rather than later" to go beyond just naming things that can be seen. He concludes:

For this, the experience of stories is probably the ideal preparation .... Gradually, they will lead them to reflect on their experience and, in so doing, to discover the power that language has, through its symbolic potential, to create and explore alternative possible worlds with their own inner coherence and logic. Stories may thus lead to the imaginative, hypothetical stance that is required in a wide range of intellectual activities and for problem-solving of all kinds. . . [emphasis added]. [12]

What is actually happening in today's homes? Teachers of young children are worried that children aren't being read to enough at home today. They say many of their charges now come to school unfamiliar with the narrative staples of our literature: folk and fairy tales, "classic" children's stories, even nursery rhymes. Deficits are showing up especially among middle and upper-middle class children from "the type of families" where these stories were, until quite recently, standard fare. The librarian in one suburban school told me, "It's amazing to me that they come to kindergarten and first grade having no experience with nursery rhymes. It used to be they were all familiar with them and many could recite along with you; now hardly any are familiar. Is there such a thing as 'cultural illiteracy' for five-year-olds?"

Why are nursery rhymes so important? Not only do they get children "hooked" on listening to language, but they also teach valuable skills. "It's the patterns, the rhythms," she explains, "the way language is put together so pleasantly. Patterns are the most important for early reading -- and even for math. Putting letters together in patterns, learning that everything in the world goes together in patterns -- that's so important for the little ones."

"I have to start from scratch with most of these kids," said a kindergarten teacher in another school. I'm supposed to teach rhyming words in the reading readiness program, but half these kids don't know what a rhyme is. And a lot seem to be missing that internal sense of rhythm."

Reading specialists tell us children's ability to discriminate and create rhyming words, as well as their sense of rhythm, are closely related to early reading ability. A child who has absorbed over and over -- through the ears, not the eyes -- such common word parts as "fun, sun, run" or "fiddle, diddle, middle" as well as the melody of their language is statistically destined to have an easier time learning to read.

Language Coaches

Ideally, children have one-on-one language coaches built into their lives from birth, when interactions between parent and infant lay the groundwork for nonverbal communication skills. Some parents mistakenly believe the first year is not important for language stimulation, yet during these months basic synapses of the language system are constructed by such "simple" means as non talking games (pat-a-cake, peekaboo) between infant and caretaker. Turn-taking, even without words, is an important first lesson. During early months the brain also takes in its lasting repertoire of sounds for speaking and listening to the nuances of its native language.

Parents seem to have built-in knowledge of how to act as "language coach" while the child's abilities develop. Studies show that mothers instinctively shape and expand their child's language, tailoring their own responses precisely to each child's developmental need. They seem to know just how to pull the youngster's language up a notch by using forms in their own speech that are just one degree above the child's current level. Simply exposing children to adult language does not automatically make the learning "take," because youngsters can't repeat speech patterns that are much more complicated than those they are already using (another reason, incidentally, why most TV -- even Sesame Street -- is a flop as a language model). [13]

A burning current question asks whether other adults can also do this job. The few studies available suggest that fathers, too, may be quite skilled at tailoring language to a child. [14] Other adults and even older children can also be effective, but only if they have the skill to move on to more complex vocabulary and grammar when children are ready. When parents hire caretakers with different language patterns from their own, they should not be surprised if their child's development is affected.

Overall, being a parent may confer a special advantage. One recent study compared children's interactions with parents and with other well-intentioned adults who were not parents. Parents did a much better job of guiding the children's language, even if the children weren't their own. [15] Perhaps the secret is to be in close enough touch with a growing mind to become sensitized to what is happening inside it.

Development of brain systems beyond the most fundamental layers of language depend on the availability of the right kind of stimulation at the proper time. Anyone who has ever watched a small child pester an adult to get a certain kind of answer, realizes that children will try to elicit the right kind of conversation if adults are interested and available. This ideal scenario is increasingly missing, however, even in homes where parents expect to see their child on top of the academic heap. At this writing, the majority of babies born in the United States are placed in full-time day care within a year, commonly within two or three months, so their mothers can return to work. [16] American preschoolers spend a great deal of time watching television -- missing both personal interaction and language content tailored to each child's developmental schedule. We don't know how many children are being encouraged to be quiet by overburdened caretakers, by parents who are pressed for time, or by hired baby-sitters who have poor mastery of English and would rather watch the soaps.

Are schools taking over the job? A resounding NO is, unfortunately, the answer. In many day-care centers and classrooms, teachers have too many children to see to and may even lack the interest or the skills to participate with them. Neglect of verbal interaction during the apex of the brain's sensitive period for language acquisition is a serious issue, but many so-called "reliable" programs overlook the priority of interactive talk. In one typical study, researchers observed the everyday interactions of children and their teachers in two well-regarded child care centers in the United States. They found:

The children spent most of their time in teacher-directed large-group activities, and ... most of their language behavior was receptive, such as listening to and following teachers' directions. Although teachers provided adequate oral language models, they were not active listeners, did not encourage curiosity about language, and did not spontaneously expand on children's vocabulary or concepts. [17]

In other settings the situation is even worse. Basic concerns for physical needs and safety predominate; even teacher talk is minimized. In some centers children watch video for substantial portions of the day.

For older children, too, schools neglect specific measures to make up for gaps in language development before it's too late. "We have to teach them the three R's and all the other stuff that gets neglected at home -- from sex education to how to climb trees. Don't tell me we also have to teach them how to talk!" complained one school administrator.

"As a society, are we neglecting our children's language development?" I asked Dr. Schieffelin, who has compared language development in many cultures with that in the United States.

"That's what it looks like," she replied. "But I don't want to blame caretakers. Many mothers have to work. The problem is that there has to be some institutional support; someone has to help out, and that's not happening."

Dr. Schieffelin believes that we should rearrange our societal priorities to get children interacting with language. She says schools and day-care centers should encourage children to talk with peers as well as with adults. But classes are often too big. How, she asks, can teachers be expected to encourage language interaction when they must control overly large groups of children in classrooms -- by keeping them quiet?

"We need to look at this ideology of silence; why is it that silence is seen as being in control and talk is seen as being out of control? Children can't be passive learners! I really think they need a lot of opportunity to experiment, talk to each other in ways that are not necessarily appropriate to adults -- word play, sound play, role play -- but teachers have so many kids in the room they can't tolerate the noise level." [18]

Passive "listening" does not build either language or effective listening skills. Our children today spend a great deal of time "listening" (to the TV, to the teacher), but they need to listen better, not just listen more. Real listening is an active mental process that serves understanding and memory. Classrooms where children are passively "listening" to teachers who do most of the talking are a dangerous anachronism. Studies of elementary and secondary school classrooms, where up to 80% of conversation is "teacher talk," even in primary grades, support Dr. Schieffelin's concern. When I visited a number of schools to record samples of children using language in the classrooms, I had trouble finding anything but isolated phrases or short answers to teachers' questions. Much of the "talk" was a one-way street, as the teacher presented material, gave directions, or asked factual questions requiring only brief answers. Only in rare classrooms were children encouraged to formulate complete sentences, expand on answers, or use more complex grammar. Even more rarely were children encouraged to talk to each other, ask each other questions -- or even, in fact, to ask questions at all!

Children with insufficient language skills have difficulty requesting information or analyzing problems because they can't formulate appropriate questions. They register overall confusion ("I don't understand"), but lack the verbal tools to analyze the problem; they often remain silent because they can't get their curiosity into words. Their learning suffers accordingly, particularly in subjects such as math and science, where asking the right question is often as important as getting the right answer. In order to analyze problems and evaluate alternatives, children need active practice asking and attempting to answer their own questions. Too much "teacher talk" gets in the way of such higher-level reasoning because it prevents children from doing their own thinking! Observing in British primary schools, linguist Gordon Wells was struck by

the very high proportion of teacher utterances that are questions, and of these what a very small proportion are questions to which the teachers do not already know the answer. Even when the form of the question seems to invite a variety of answers, there is often only one that is really acceptable to the teacher, and it is not uncommon to see children gazing at the teacher's face in an effort to guess what is in her mind, down to the precise word. [19]

In another era, when children's out-of-school environments provided richer language experiences, schools could, and did, assume that most children would arrive in the elementary or junior high school classroom with verbal skills adequate for their educational purposes. Now, a growing number of educational journals advise teachers not to assume skills of listening, verbal expression, verbal inquiry, and analysis. Children who come from homes where English is not the primary language particularly need special attention, special teaching techniques, and special sensitivity, but all students need an interactive language environment. Reality, however, trails good advice by at least ten years, and many, if not most, classrooms have too many children and insufficient support. Moreover, many also have such rigid "objectives" that even well-intentioned teachers may be forced to push pedagogy at the expense of curiosity.

As a society, we are inviting intellectual mediocrity if we neglect the quality of the language experience of our young. Linguistic passivity for large numbers of children of any age is a recipe for limitation, not only in their individual development but in the cut of our cultural fabric of thought.

WHAT'S HAPPENING TO KIDS' LANGUAGE?

Teachers today are variably puzzled, concerned, discouraged, and outraged by declines in native-English-speaking students' ability to use language coherently and analytically. Many are not aware that this problem also accounts for "fuzzy thinking." As I visit classrooms, I see ample reason for concern.

"Well, It's Like ... You Know ... "

In a suburban classroom eight fifth graders sit around a table reading silently from a textbook. Their teacher holds a manual from which he will read questions about the story. As the children finish reading, they look up expectantly.

"Who can tell me what Rebecca's problem was and how she tried to solve it?" asks the teacher. Hands shoot up. "Okay, Hank, give it a try."

"Well, it was like her friend Sam was uh -- you know -- uh -- like there, er, trapped -- uh -- under a tree, you know, one that fell down, and Rebecca tried to use a thing -- you know -- a branch to, like, er . . ." Arms waving, Hank pantomimes a prying motion.

"Pry?" suggests the teacher.

"Yeah, to like pry the tree off him."

"Good, Hank. Susan, will you explain how well Rebecca's plan worked?"

"I'm not really sure," ventures Susan. "I sort of lost it after Rebecca yelled. Like who were those other people that came? I couldn't figure out whether this was before or after she ran into town."

Later, in the faculty room, the teacher appeals for help. "How can I teach these kids to express themselves better? They talk a lot but they have such trouble expressing their ideas clearly. I think it affects what they understand. We used to be able to use harder books in fifth grade, but now even when they can 'read' all the words, they can't seem to put it together. And you should see their writing!" He rolls his eyes. "Yet in so many ways these kids are really smart. Do you think I should be teaching them differently?"

Recently I observed a class of ninth graders in a private school discussing the book Animal Farm. The students were lively and interested, they clearly had some important ideas they wanted to express, and many did a wonderful job of it. But it was sometimes painful to hear others try. One snippet of dialogue that I jotted down occurred as a girl tried to describe the behavior of a tyrant:

"You know how he's like . . . ," she began. Then, abandoning that line of thought, she started again, "When he tried to ... you know" -- gesturing vigorously -- "he did it."

As the conversation progressed, the teacher tried to get the students to compare themes in the book with issues in their own society. She posed the question of what people should do if someone starts acting like a tyrant.

"Oh, yeah," cried one student. "That was on Magnum last night."

"Couldn't you tell them ...," volunteered another, "I forget what it's called -- couldn't you just tell them that they should get out?"

I do not wish to imply that these excerpts characterize all class discussions or that many, many students do not think clearly and express themselves well. Obviously, we cannot expect perfection from ten- and fourteen-year-olds. My concerns, and those expressed by many veteran teachers who have written and spoken to me, are more centered on the suspicion that more and more students are unable to use language -- oral or written -- with the types of precision that might reasonably be expected at any given age or supposed "ability level." This development goes hand in hand with an overwhelming barrage of reports about declining listening skills.

What the Teachers Say

Students have always needed help understanding and expressing themselves -- otherwise they wouldn't be students. And some teachers have always complained. Nevertheless, an increasing number of teachers feel that declining verbal skills are partially responsible for their not being able to achieve the kind of standards in class discussions, reading, and writing that they once took for granted -- with the same type of students. They repeatedly express a core of concerns:

• declining listening skills: inability to maintain attention, to understand, and remember material presented orally
• decreased ability to get facts and ideas into coherent, orderly form in speaking and writing
• tendency to communicate with gestures along with, or instead of, words
• declining vocabulary knowledge above fourth-grade level
• proliferation of "fillers" instead of substantive words ("You know, like, the thing, well, like the thing he did for his, you know, project . . .")
• difficulty hearing differences between sounds in words and getting them in order; this shows up in difficulty pronouncing and reading "long" words and in spelling
• faltering comprehension of more difficult reading material
• trouble understanding longer sentences, embedded clauses, more advanced grammatical structures in upper grades
• difficulty switching from colloquial language to written form

Not surprisingly, different concerns surface at different grade levels. Preschoolers are reported to have more trouble sitting still and listening to stories or short discussion than did children of previous decades, but they are often seen as having larger vocabularies ("Especially for clinical terms concerned with sex, reproduction, and disease," wryly commented one teacher) and a broader store of general information. Many little children appear to be "advanced" because they have adopted a veneer of sophistication from television.

In primary grades, most language demands can be handled by the brain's basic systems, which usually develop with any amount of normal input. Thus, although attention problems are always mentioned, language problems may not be specifically identified until about fourth grade, when the higher-level aspects -- those that depend more on enriched experience -- are called on. At this point, the neural legacy of contemporary culture creates an increasing mismatch between students' language abilities and schools' expectations. Problems with language understanding and usage become increasingly evident as children move into grades that have traditionally demanded higher-level thinking and organizational skills, comprehension of harder books, and increased amounts of writing. Reading test scores start to plummet.

As students move into middle school, teachers express greater concern about listening skills, vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension, and the ability to use language to express ideas effectively. Unless students read a lot on their own, their vocabulary growth slows down somewhere near the fourth-grade level -- approximately the level of media language. Many schools try to remedy the deficit by making kids memorize vocabulary lists, but students rapidly forget words they rarely read, hear, or use in normal conversation. With harder reading selections, comprehension problems also arise as children find the unfamiliar forests of more complicated texts (e.g., essays, poetry, literature with involved plots, plays) very bewildering places indeed.

In high school, language difficulties continue to show up in subtle problems with: planning, sequencing, and organizing ideas; classifying; grasping the fine distinctions between concepts; reasoning about cause and effect (if A, then B; because X, then Y); understanding relationships of ideas in their reading; reasoning in math and science; expressing ideas accurately and directly; reflecting internally on their own thinking, and even managing their own behavior.

Several university professors have recently told me they cannot believe the difficulties students nowadays have with analytic thinking. For example, a well-known psychology teacher at a major university in Florida said, "It's a source of amazement to me how many students can't link ideas together; they can't follow one idea logically with another. I have older adult students and younger undergraduates in my classes, and it's the younger ones I'm having more trouble with. I really think it's because they have such poor verbal skills. If you don't have a good grasp of the language, you have no tools to think with. You haven't formed the appropriate categories verbally to combine ideas. Language changes the way your brain sets up the categories it works with. For these students the whole thought process just isn't there; the linkages between ideas that language provides are missing."

Wide variations in abilities to use language as a tool for thinking are a natural part of the human condition. There will always be students -- even bright and talented ones -- whose brains do not bend easily around analytic and logical uses of language. Children differ genetically in their aptitude for language learning, and it is clearly absurd to expect equal facility from everyone with any particular set of mental tools. The concern I hear expressed over and over is not that a few students are faltering, but that many are. These observations show a startlingly similar pattern at every level of the socioeconomic scale, with some of the most dramatic changes in children's language abilities reported by teachers at the country's most selective private schools.

Voices From Abroad

Is the problem unique to the United States? Apparently not, although it appears to be much worse here. One infant school teacher from Coventry, England, said, "We thought it wouldn't happen in England, but it is happening here, too. Children's language skills are suffering along with their ability to stop and think. The speed of life, what they're getting from T.V. -- that lovely, typically British thing of standing and staring, reflecting, is being eroded."

"It's beginning -- something we were trying to avoid for many a year," lamented a Dublin Montessori consultant. "Children are not speaking properly because they're not hearing words pronounced slowly. T.V. is too fast. Spelling is declining because they don't hear the sounds. If you hear two teenagers speaking, they can understand each other but we can't understand them. It's like a pidgin English -- a shortened version of the real words. Teachers have to slow down far more than they ever did before. We're dealing with a different type of child. Children who are institutionalized from day one don't have the same rich language environment as those at home with only one or two adults."

Said a college professor from London, "It's very scary. I see it in the students at the college -- they don't seem to be able to translate their thoughts from head to paper. We didn't used to see this, and it seems to be getting worse."

Educators in France have similar issues on their minds. The principal of a middle school (college) in southwestern France, said of his students, "Their capacities for listening have declined. Proper language use is poorly known; they don't understand the nuances of language. They write and spell very badly, and their grammar -- it's horrible! They have smaller vocabularies and they chatter instead of reflecting before they talk. It takes them five or six sentences to say what they mean. One finds it even in the best students, deficits in attention and expression. I tell the teachers, we have to accept these children where they are; with all the distractions -- music, television -- society has changed."

As we concluded our interview, my French host remarked, "I have a daughter who is considered a good student now, but twenty years ago -- she would not have been so good."

The Legacy of "McLanguage"

Observers tend to blame the schools for lack of training in the fine points of language and grammar. London columnist Brian Dunning, in a recent article entitled "Doesn't Anybody Here Talk English Any More?" decried a new generation in Britain "which runs a finger under words of more than one syllable," and students who, when shown a noun or a verb, will "blink like rabbits confronted with Wittgenstein." [20]

Unfortunately, when children come to school with a deficient base for higher-order language and reasoning skills, schools cannot simply "cure" the problem by waving a magic grammar or spelling book! One nationally noted learning specialist has some strong feelings about the real causes of the current problem.

"I call the trend in kids' talk today 'McLanguage,''' declares Priscilla Vail, author of Clear and Lively Writing [21] and Smart Kids with School Problems. [22] "It's verbal fast food made up of inflection, gesture, and condensation." Vail's consultations on bright children's learning problems in both public and private schools have convinced her that societal changes are overwhelming the schools with students who need remedial language training. Most learning disabilities are related to underlying language problems, yet increasing numbers of youngsters are permitted to be "linguistically malnourished," she says. The most basic problem is they don't learn to listen analytically.

"For one thing," Vail explains, "children can't spell because they are unaccustomed to separating out sounds and putting them in order -- their listening experience has ill-prepared them to listen for fine differences in sounds or in meaning."

Good spelling, of course, also comes from seeing words in print (i. e., lots of reading). Research shows that a major factor contributing to both poor reading and poor spelling, however, is not lack of visual skill, but rather poor critical listening abilities. One typical study that compared good and poor readers showed that differences in a skill called "phonological awareness" was highly related to reading ability in both elementary school children and adults. "Phonological awareness" is the ability not only to hear the sounds in words but also to analyze their order. For example, the child is asked to: "Say 'smile' without the s"; move different-colored blocks to show the order of sounds in words (e.g., b-a-t, t-a-b); listen to a word and tell whether it is long like "bicycle" or short like "bike." Good readers (and good spellers, as well) are strikingly better at this type of listening than are poor readers, even when both groups have similar IQ scores. [23] Because these skills are accomplished in a special part of the left hemisphere of most people's brains, some researchers speculate that this complex of skills is related to inherited differences in brain structure, but studies have clearly shown that early exposure and practice also have a great deal to do with the way these areas develop. Today's children are exposed to lots of sound, but that is exactly what concerns Vail. "I am particularly worried about the kids who conform to the listening patterns of pop music," she says. "Their brains are being trained to listen uncritically to lyrics that are limited to repetitive syllables or short phrases that hardly sound like English. The beat overrides the melody, and there is no beginning, no middle, and no end. That is a poor training ground for understanding language!"

Interestingly enough, the parts of the brain that respond to this sort of musical immersion are in the right hemisphere, opposite from the areas that make people good at "phonological awareness." When we see young children encase their minds in stereo headphones, we should wonder what synapses are being strengthened -- and at what cost?

Vail agrees, too, that children fail to develop skills they will need in school because conversation is suffering in homes. A veteran working mother of four, now a grandmother, she sympathizes with weary adults, but at the same time she worries about their children. "When you're tired, the last thing you want to do is have a long conversation with someone who's not on your level," she sighs. "Many children today, even in the 'best' homes, never hear rich, elaborated sentences. And when parents do talk with their kids, they do it with short sentences and a lot of gestures. These parents may have good language skills, but this is a culture of immediate gratification. We want instant information through eyes as well as ears, but academic learning requires the thoughtful mediation of language and the delay of working through print. We're giving kids competing messages when we raise them without any models of slow, thoughtful language and then expect them to listen to the teacher and understand what they read."

Whatever Happened to Storytelling?

Many children today are also missing out on a rich "oral tradition," in English or another language, that can enhance written language or stand by itself in a culture where writing is not generally used to communicate ideas. Although writing -- and the kind of talking and thinking that go along with it -- promotes the development of school-like ways of reasoning, the arts of storytelling, oral history, and conversation have their own special niche in developing reflective thought, memory, and attention. We will see in later chapters what an absence of good listening experiences may be doing, not only to attention spans, but to reading comprehension for today's students. For now, let us move on to explore some of the specific ways in which different forms of language usage may affect the modes of thinking -- and the brains -- that children take to school with them.

[admin]

CHAPTER 5: Sagging Syntax, Sloppy Semantics, and Fuzzy Thinking

If your language did not include the words red, pink, and coral, would your mind work the same way as it does now when you look at a geranium? How accurately can you compare democracy, communism, and socialism without using words? Without language, how would you go about planning and communicating the details of a party three months in advance?

No one denies that the way people use language is braided together tightly with the way they think. But exactly how much language actually shapes thought, and vice versa, is an old argument.

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

Do Different Languages Make People Think Differently?

One unresolved issue concerns whether speaking different types of languages makes people not only think differently about the world but also perceive things differently. [1, 2] Some researchers have suggested, for example, that speakers of a language that includes in its vocabulary only a few color names (corresponding, perhaps, to shades of light and dark rather than hue) would perceive only the color values for which they had words. It is hard to grapple with the notion that in their minds geraniums might look quite different. According to this idea, Arctic Inuits who have several hundred words for different types of snow could be expected to reason more precisely about snow than members of cultures with fewer terms -- and possibly, fewer shades of meaning.

Precision of semantic meaning can apply to verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as well as nouns (e.g., What is the difference between hurl and toss, or between exquisite and beautiful?). Language users who have these types of distinctions available may have mental access to more analytic forms of thinking than those whose lexicon is restricted to more general words (e.g., throw, or pretty).

The main danger of this position is setting up some types of language -- and the accompanying thought -- as arbitrarily "better" than others. Many linguists now view "good" reasoning as that which works best for the needs of the culture in which it takes place, and the best linguistic training as that which readies children's brains for the specific types of thinking valued and needed in their society. A child in a society primarily involved in food gathering, hunting, or navigation, for example, might never be required to write an analytic essay or research paper; one raised in a culture of artisans, where aesthetic beauty is of primary value, might not be encouraged to reason algebraically and therefore would not need the "language" of algebraic equations. [3, 4]

In our Western culture, where we claim to value abstract, analytic reasoning, children are expected to be prepared to think accordingly. These higher-level abilities are not automatically built into the brain. They come only from specific kinds of language and educational experience that prod synapses into patterns we deem "more intelligent."

Many scientists have speculated about how language specifically affects intelligence. Alexander Luria, a renowned neuropsychologist who was fascinated by the workings of growing brains, insisted that language physically builds the brain's higher-reasoning centers. He claimed that, without language, humans would not have developed abstract, categorical thinking: [5]

Language, in the course of social history, became the decisive instrument which helped humans transcend the boundaries of sensory experience, assign symbols, and formulate certain generalizations and categories. When the child names something, pronouncing, for example, "that is a steam engine," he begins to understand that in the movement of the machine named, steam plays a role and that it moves other objects. In mastering words and using them the child analyses and synthesizes the phenomena of the external world, using not only his personal experience but the experience of mankind. He classifies objects, he begins to perceive them differently and with this to remember them differently [italics added]. [6]

David Premack of the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, wondering if language could change the reasoning skills of animals, taught a form of language to chimpanzees to see if it would improve their scores on IQ-type tests that were oriented toward verbal meaning. Although chimpanzees cannot speak, Premack taught them to communicate by arranging plastic chips standing for words into simple grammatical statements (e.g., "Give Suzie banana."). He then retested their ability to reason in certain ways and also tested human children on the same types of tasks. We should all be happy to learn that even educated apes are not about to take over the world, since Premack clearly showed that human children, even before they learn language, think more incisively than chimps do. Nevertheless, these experiments showed with equal clarity that language symbols did change the chimps' abilities to reason. Simply teaching them words for the concepts "same" and "different" enabled them for the first time to see this distinction among categories of objects and thus pass more of the tests. [7]

Language is, of course, not the sole route to thought. Chimps -- and people -- can reason nonverbally, and a lively human mental life also uses visual imagery and nonverbal symbols to interpret and remember experience. Painters, sculptors, and architects do not rely heavily on language to develop their artistic ideas. Likewise, highly abstract mathematical reasoning may ultimately call on systems in the brain other than, or in addition to, those used for language processing, even though the learner must master the basic language of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.

Despite the obvious importance of nonverbal forms of intelligence, there is as yet no substitute for language, used in tandem with visual reasoning, to hone precision of expression and analysis. In the schools to which we consign youngsters for so many hours of their lives, written language is the coin of the realm. Allowing children to enter with shallow linguistic resources puts them in intellectual jeopardy and creates dangerous tensions within education.

Syntax: The Grammar of Relationships

The grammar of language is one of the main ways by which people reason about relationships. When I speak of grammar, or "syntax," I am not talking about the rules we learned in school, but rather about the ones we figured out for ourselves, starting before age two. Putting the verb before the object ("Get cookie") and adding s for more than one are simple examples.

This ability to induce rules, for which the human brain is noted, is probably the reason basic syntactic abilities are said to be "experience expectant"; we aren't born with noun and verb rules clinging to synapses but rather with an innate ability to figure out categories and apply principles that let us generalize about the regularities in any domain of experience. [8] If a young child becomes frightened by a dog, for example, he may start to categorize all dogs as mean until he broadens his rule system to include friendly as well as unfriendly ones. When he notices that adding s makes more than one, he will apply this rule to all words ("mouses") until he broadens that system. The basic drive to make this kind of sense out of the world has doubtless helped keep our species alive.

Learning such rules takes many individual experiences before the general principle is finally internalized. Thus, children who are not frequently exposed to "literate language" may never internalize understanding of this kind of discourse, either its vocabulary or its grammatical rules. Children who do not have the sound of more complex language "in their gut" have particular problems understanding the subtle distinctions in meaning that are carried by abstract "little words" (or, if, would, might, did), and word endings ("I think" vs. "I am thinking"). The order of words in a sentence also conveys many important conceptual relationships that become increasingly important for clear thinking, reading and writing after primary grades. [9]

Her father fed her dog the biscuits vs.

Her father fed her the dog biscuits.

Students not attuned to processing fine distinctions in the sequence of words get all mixed up by sentences like this, whether they hear or read them. Another frequent stumbling block is the grammar of time sequence and cause and effect:

Before John ate dinner, he played ball.

Because the last train had left, he stayed all night.

Still other confusing but common constructions are embedded information:

The bill vetoed by the President . . .

and passive voice:

... was not the one that had been recommended by our committee. Understanding tense markers (when did the veto take place: before or after the recommendation?) also requires syntactic ability.

''These fine points of language take the person beyond the threshold of the visual world," says Priscilla Vail. "Without language, we're limited to our visual horizon; language allows children to move beyond that hidden machinery of cause and effect. If parents want their kids to do well in school or get into a good college, they have to start with language. A rich vocabulary is the foundation, but the ability to describe, compare, and categorize with language is what leads to our ability to think in analogy -- that's the highest level, and it's also what is tested on the SATs!"

How the Brain Handles Grammar

In terms of what is happening to children's brains, it is important to understand that the orderly, grammatic, syntactic details of a language, its sounds, and probably the fine-grained distinctions in word meaning, are handled by the left hemisphere of the cortex in most right-handed people. More general understanding of word meaning, gesture, and interpretation of visual communication (e.g., facial expressions) is mainly directed for most of us by the less analytic right hemisphere. [10] In the sentence "The dog was chased by the cat," for example, right hemisphere semantic systems probably connect the words (e.g., cat, dog, and chase) with mental pictures and/or networks of previous associations. In order to understand the details of what happened (Who did the chasing? Is the time now, yesterday, or tomorrow?), we must use the left hemisphere. When I hear students' conversation these days, I often wonder if both sides are getting sufficient exercise!

Even verbal fluency, per se, does not signify full development of left-hemisphere language systems. Sometimes seemingly precocious vocabulary development and pseudosophistication fool adults who believe that a child who chatters a lot must have good language development. Not true! Some of the hardest learning problems to treat are those of kids who talk on and on but have trouble getting to the point. They have a large set of general associations, but they have big trouble synthesizing them and getting the details in order: Their words ride around their thoughts like Indians circling a wagon train, but they never get around to the attack. Many times, because these students also have trouble talking to themselves about what they're thinking, they don't even know what their point -- or their question -- is! "You know. . ." substitutes for verbal -- and mental -- precision; it is up to the listener to fill in the blanks. This problem is clinically classified as a form of "language disability," but it seems to be increasingly evident among "normal" students in today's "McLanguage" environments.

Since it has long been recognized that problems with verbal precision can result from deficits in the left hemisphere, language therapists speculate among themselves about how much the overwhelming visual presence of television and video may be exacerbating the problem by neglecting left-hemisphere language areas. In the next chapter and in our discussion of television, we will look more critically at this possibility.

Slipping syntax leads to fuzzy thought. Difficulties using grammatical language to identify relationships between ideas may account for many of the problems in logical thinking, science, and math that are becoming so evident in our high schools. Many problems with thinking go unrecognized until students must formulate ideas clearly enough to put them down on paper. In observing classrooms, I have commonly seen students "get by" in class discussions with short, superficial answers or a lot of gestures and verbal circling of the topic ("You know" -- and the teacher does, so the kid is off the hook). The teacher is usually unaware that the class is responding at a conversational, not an analytic, level. When he assigns an in-class writing assignment, however, their cover is blown.

"These kids can't think!" wails the teacher.

Writing: The Last Straw

Writing is the road test for language as a vehicle of thought. An alarming number of students coming off our linguistic assembly lines are failing it. "Very few of our students can write well," states Archie E. Lapointe, executive director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. "Most students, majority and minority alike, are unable to write adequately except in response to the simplest of tasks." [11]

Well-reasoned and well-organized writing proceeds from a mind trained to use words analytically. No matter how good, how creative, or how worthy a student's ideas, their effectiveness is constrained by the language in which they are wrapped.

Teachers are more discouraged by the quality of students' writing than by anything else except their ability to listen well. Why is writing so much more difficult than other language tasks? First of all, it demands a firm base of oral language skill. Students who have not learned to line up words effectively when they speak are not going to be able to do so on paper. Secondly, good written language is quite different from colloquial "talk written down." Awareness of its sound comes only from extensive listening to and/or reading quality prose and poetry. Moreover, expressing an idea on paper demands that the writer remove language from the here and now; gestures and "you know's" just don't work!

Writing allows us to give our ideas a life of their own apart from the immediacy of speech, but this more abstract approach requires use of more complex syntax to link ideas together. Otherwise we get what I call "Dick and Jane" prose ("See Spot. See Spot run."). The most difficult aspect of writing clearly, however, is that it demands the ability to organize thought."

A teacher who was trying to help her second graders learn to write fluently came to me for advice about an otherwise good student who was having terrible trouble producing even a simple story. Her handwriting was good, she could copy anything quite easily, and when answering questions raised by the teacher she used age-appropriate language. When she tried to write anything original, however, she and the paper remained equally blank.

We decided that the teacher would offer to act as "secretary" and ask the little girl simply to tell her a story. Here is a sample from the child's first narrative:

And then she was ... Dan ... she was ... Danny was probably wondering what Tanya was thinking.

'Cause he was wondering like ... Tanya was, um, smiling " ... she was probably thinking and ... "

Danny was thinking what ... was wondering what Tanya was thinking.

No wonder this child can't get ideas down on paper! She has not yet learned to arrange them in her mind.

When students in second grade show such difficulties, we expect to work with them to correct the problem. Now, however, university professors are starting to complain that they must also teach writing and thinking skills they used to take for granted. A Harvard professor recently began sending thank-you letters to the high schools of his students who can write clearly and intelligently.

"As I note the increasing roughness in student prose, I find myself heartened by rare examples such as the one presented by Miss X," he wrote in one. Later, in a telephone interview, he explained, "I think there's a definite decline in the quality of student writing. There's something fuzzy there; it's actually an imprecision of language reaching into a fuzziness of thought. They're beginning to lose the concept of words like better, so they think of good and best, or tall instead of tallest. What is interesting to me is how frequently I cannot get my students to write down what they mean. I spend a lot of time with them on their writing -- far more than I think I should have to at a college like this. They simply can't do many of the things that were fundamental fifteen years ago when I started here."

The Grammar of Mathematics

Most people, even math teachers, are not aware that problems with language can cause difficulties in mathematical reasoning. The verbal tools that clarify relationships in reading and writing do the same job in math, and studies of children with exceptional mathematical talents often reveal similarly high verbal skills. [12] On the flip side, even bright hearing-impaired children are likely to have problems with math beyond computation, possibly because they have not had experience with the necessarily precise, sequential uses of language. Some words important in beginning math are those that tell about the direction in which the numbers and the thinking go: (e.g., before, after, into, above, under, away, over); causation (e.g., if then, because); or actions (e.g., add, multiply). The terms borrowing from, dividing into, or multiplying by are only a few examples that often confuse children who have trouble attaching the sequence of the language meaning to the numerals on the page. Advanced math courses such as algebra demand special skills in logical, sequential reasoning that often come wrapped in a form of syntax.

"Paying attention to words can help students cope with numbers," declares Joan Countryman, a nationally known math teacher who is working on a book called Writing to Learn Mathematics. She has found that having students write about problems helps them with the kind of logical thinking they need to come up with good solutions. Improving their language skills is her first step in improving mathematical reasoning.

Other teachers have hit upon this idea out of desperation. One algebra teacher from Tennessee, who described today's crop of students as "terrible problem solvers," commented, "I think the lack of understanding of English is the problem. I have to go through each problem step by step, underline the subject, the verb; we look for the verb that shows what equals what, then we take the prepositional phrases and analyze them. If we have a problem with a statement like 'It took John two hours longer to go the same distance,' they have to understand the language before they can get a picture in their mind about what is happening. Until then, there is no way they can really understand what kind of an equation is needed."

In her book Twice as Less, Eleanor Wilson Orr describes her own awakening to the ways in which use of prepositions, conjunctions, and relative pronouns can affect students' concepts of quantitative relationships. Working with students who spoke nonstandard English, she became convinced that their "reasoning problems" were, in actuality, reflections of differences in use of the language.

In a chemistry class a student stated that ... the volume of a gas would be half more than it was. When I asked her if she meant that the volume would get larger, she said, "No, smaller." When I then explained that half more than would mean larger, indicating the increase with my hands, she said she meant twice and with her hands indicated a decrease. When I then said, "But twice means larger," ... she said, "I guess I mean half less than. It always confuses me."

By initiating math and science courses that start with words as a basis for understanding, Ms. Orr is helping students improve their learning by using the "power of language as an instrument with which one can reason beyond the observable." [13]

Differences in the way children are taught to talk about numbers may even account for some of the gaps between achievement of Japanese and American children, according to two California researchers. In a new and provocative study they demonstrated that language differences make it easier for Japanese children to understand "place value," a cornerstone of math competency and one of the things teachers have a lot of trouble getting most American children to understand. The reason for the difference, they say, may be that, unlike English, many Asian languages have spoken words for numbers that systematically describe their written relationship to ten. For example, in Japanese, 11, 12, and 20 are spoken as "ten-one," "ten-two," and "two-ten(s)," much less confusing for a child than the terms eleven, twelve, and twenty, which do not easily translate into any linear numerical equivalent. Many American youngsters mix up such numbers as seventeen and seventy; Japanese children can understand them more easily because 17 is spoken as "ten-seven" and 70 as "seven-ten(s)".

In a study of forty-eight high-achieving first-grade students in both countries, these researchers showed dramatic differences in their ability to represent numbers according to place value, giving the Japanese a real leg up on more complex computation and reasoning. Whereas American teachers labor mightily teaching place value for addition and subtraction in second grade, Japanese students at the same level master it handily and move on to multiplication. While one variable clearly cannot account for all differences, additional research on the way language shapes mathematical thinking may show other important variations. [14]

Why Aren't Children Learning Grammar?

The solution to all these problems seems to be simple. The schools should teach grammar. When schools attempt to teach "grammar" as they currently define it, however, they try to paste labels (e.g., "adverb," "clause") and rules ("adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs") on a system that needs to be embedded in the brain in a fundamentally different way. Without the foundations, beating "grammar" rules into brains is difficult; sometimes it seems impossible.

Evidently, little grammar is learned from watching television. Children may gain some vocabulary knowledge, but no one has shown that they pick up syntactic forms. Studies of preschoolers who watched Sesame Street showed that they learned to recognize more words than children who had not viewed the program (the tests merely asked them to point to pictures representing words, not to say anything), but no syntactic gains were noted. In another study, experimenters showed Dutch children TV programs in German in an effort to get them to learn German. They did not.

Several interesting studies have shown that TV was an equally poor language coach for normally hearing children raised by deaf parents. In one example, two normally hearing brothers were cared for at home only by their deaf mother until soon after the eldest was enrolled in nursery school. When the children were first tested at ages five and two, their only language experience had come from television and, for the elder child, brief exposure at school. His language, particularly his grammar, was peculiar and his younger brother had no language at all. Fortunately, both children were still within the sensitive period for language development, so their progress was rapid once they began to interact with other speakers. The investigators commenting on this case point out that, beyond the most basic level, grammatical speech (and its understanding) seem to be the aspects of language acquisition most vulnerable to deprivation and also that children must use language in an interactional setting to discover and learn the rules. "All these interactional aspects of communication are missing when language is heard from an indirect source. Even an indirect source that used simpler language than that used in adult speech (for example, television programs for children) would provide a poor context for language acquisition," they state. [15]

Studies of normally speaking mothers and their children confirm the importance of direct personal experience for learning these refinements of language. Although youngsters pick up basic vocabulary words and meaning quite well despite the speech style of their mothers, they miss out on higher-level grammatical abilities if their mothers fail to use them. It may not matter very much what language is being spoken, as long as the brain learns to process some well-developed system of grammar.

Some interesting recent studies of deaf persons who learned American Sign Language (ASL), which has a complete set of grammatical rules comparable to those of spoken English, have also proven that there are special slots in the developmental schedule for mastery of more complex syntax and for the little words and endings that carry subtle meanings (e.g., the differences between saying "A teacher is in the room." and "The teacher is in the room."). Dr. Elissa Newport tested deaf adults who had first been exposed to ASL, at different ages: at birth, between four and six years, or after age eleven. She became a believer in sensitive periods for the development of syntax when she discovered significant differences in the subjects' proficiency depending on the time of their first exposure to ASL -- even though these people had all come from similar school and environmental backgrounds and were between fifty and seventy years old at the time of the study. After age eleven, it appeared, their brains had lost the ability to master more complex forms of syntax. They made the same types of errors that show up increasingly in the writing of today's schoolchildren. [16]

Clearly, to be well prepared for reading, writing, listening, and speaking, children need to interact with increasingly advanced language during the years of childhood. But consider briefly the current situation:

• Busy schedules or uninterested caretakers militate against oral reading and thoughtful dinner-table conversation. Much of the "talk" that does take place, even in concerned families, may center around the mechanics of the moment (e. g., "Get your hat and mittens." "When does your shift at Burger King end tonight?" "Finish your homework or no TV.").
• The quality of language models in the media is highly variable. Even if the child chooses programs with more complex language, it may be of little use without an adult around to encourage verbal response.
• Most elementary-level children read textbooks that contain a thin, watered-down syntactic gruel.
• Time and motivation for reading are increasingly usurped by television and other nonliterary demands such as extra-curricular activities, computer practice, or drill-type homework.

Is it reasonable to expect that an English teacher can patch up all the holes -- and still do a thorough job of teaching literature, expository writing, spelling, public speaking, poetry writing, reading comprehension, etc.? When kids arrive in middle and high school, we assume they should be able to ask good questions and write a grammatically coherent essay -- but most of them cannot. We also expect them to understand the books that have always been staples of the curriculum -- but whose syntax sounds to them like a foreign language!

Tom could not get away from it. Every reference to the murder sent a shudder to his heart, for his troubled conscience and fears almost persuaded him that these remarks were put forth in his hearing as "feelers"; he did not see how he could be suspected of knowing anything about the murder, but still he could not be comfortable in the midst of this gossip. -- Tom Sawyer

Unless such literature is carefully taught by a skilled teacher who knows how to make the text come alive and who is able to make the huge time commitment to help students with unfamiliar vocabulary, grammar, and voice, I can tell you what many kids do -- they simply don't read it. Instead, they continue to practice -- and to embed in their brains -- language that some linguists refer to quite descriptively as "primitive." Herein lies one of the major sources of tension between students and the curriculum.

"RESTRICTED CODES" AND THE LOSS OF THE ANALYTIC ATTITUDE

Linguists argue over whether calling a language "primitive" is either fair or accurate, but most agree that languages differ in complexity. Consider this sentence which most adult English speakers can easily understand:

The woman who lives next door brought the flowers that are on the table.

Some languages, however, can't get all these thoughts into one sentence because they lack devices to subordinate information. Speakers of such a language are limited to simpler propositions:

A woman brought the flowers.

They are on the table.

She lives next door. [17]

As another example, compare this description of a cause-effect relationship:

The meeting was not productive. The chairman was frustrated. The chairman appointed a new committee.

with this one:

Because the meeting had been unproductive, the frustrated chairman appointed a new committee.

In the first example, the absence of complex syntax forces us to infer why the chairman changed the committee and also obscures the time sequence of the events. Forms of language that contain these more complex grammatical devices are called elaborated codes. Those conveying ideas without such complex grammatical structures are called restricted codes and are the ones viewed as more "primitive." They are most useful when one speaker can see another's gestures and already knows the details of the message. "The expressions used by many peoples standing at a primitive level can be understood only if the concrete situation is known and if their gestures are observed," says Luria. [18] The simple, visual content of many television programs lends itself particularly well to this type of talk.

According to Dr. Paul Kay of the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, elaborated codes can be distinguished by their longer sentences and more varied and explicit vocabulary. They have more expressions for logical connections (e.g., thus, therefore, moreover, because, if, since, nevertheless). Restricted codes, on the other hand, are much more immediate, requiring the listener to fill in the gaps that the speaker has not made explicit (e.g., placing one's own interpretation on devices such as "You know").

Both types of speech obviously have their uses in everyday life. If you had to deliver a lecture at a neighboring university, you would be well advised to stick to elaborated codes; but if you used them when making love to your spouse, they might not be too appropriate. The trick is to be able to "code-switch" and use the best kind of syntax for the situation at hand.

Elaborated and restricted codes also differ in the use of two types of words: content words and function words. Content words are our descriptive palette of verbs, nouns, and adjectives referring to specific things, actions, or attributes (e.g., house, beautiful, running). They are also called "open class" because we keep adding and subtracting new words to these categories all the time. Our new gastronomic lexicon (e.g., quiche, sushi, pesto) or some discarded relics (e.g., buggy whip) are examples of changing open-class words. Such words are used in both types of codes and are primarily handled by the right hemisphere.

On the other hand, function words are used in more elaborated codes. They are harder to understand because they don't stand for real things. These "little" words, word endings and prefixes, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, etc. (e.g., if, but, so, did, might, un-, -ment) develop much later in a child's speech. Also called "closed class," -- their usage changes only slowly over time. Function words require use of the more analytic left hemisphere.

Use of these different types of words enables different degrees of complexity in language. Sentences containing mainly content words

Children like to run.

Children like prizes.

are the type termed "restricted," or "primitive." Adding some function words enables expression of more complexity.

Some of the children in this group might like to run if we offered a prize.

Brain circuits for getting beyond restricted codes and using language analytically ("If you have already spent your allowance on a videotape, you may not be able to go to the movies tomorrow") do not develop automatically. One linguist who recorded mothers' conversations with their preschoolers and then measured the children's language development found that unless mothers used function words themselves, their children did not pick them up. [19]

Languages are always in the process of change. Traditionally, open-class nouns and verbs have been the ones that have changed most rapidly. Among the young, however, it appears that the closed-class and syntactic markers are fast becoming obsolete. These differences may represent the source of many of the declines observed, not only in academic achievement, but also in traditional, formal reasoning.

Who Is "Primitive"?

The words primitive language are loaded ones because they imply some sort of cultural judgment. Researchers who tried several years ago to apply this concept to groups of children got into trouble because they unfairly concluded that lower-class children are socialized to use only primitive, unelaborated, forms of language and are therefore incapable of learning elaborated speech and irrevocably doomed to school failure. Subsequent research has drastically modified this overgeneralization. It is true that families with less educational background are more likely to use language that is not "schoollike," and that children from homes of "lower socioeconomic status" (which is predicated on both educational and occupational levels may have less experience than others with the types of language found in books (although this situation may be changing, as we will see in a later chapter). Few would argue with the reality that the ability to use "elaborated codes" confers a real advantage in our culture both in school and in many occupations, but assuming that all members of "lower classes" lack this tool and that all "upper classes" have it is clearly ridiculous.

Dr. Paul Kay, who is regarded as an expert in the evolution and cultural development of language, believes that issues of class and language are important but should not be overgeneralized. First of all, a more complex society has traditionally impelled all its members toward more abstract speech. In a simple "face-to-face" local community, he explains, everyone shares common experiences and can get by with simple words, short sentences, and a lot of gestures. As people become more separated, they need to develop ways of communicating about problems that are much more abstract and emotionally neutral. The more specialized we become, particularly when we begin to reason in specialized technical fields, the more we need elaborated codes. Having to put new concepts in writing, Kay believes, provides a special impetus to keep us from reaching an intellectual "dead end."

In any society, he says, some people need elaborated codes more than others. "When a society develops writing and differentiates into social classes, literate persons will usually have more occasion to speak explicitly and will tend to develop a speech style more attuned to explicit, technical, context-independent messages." But speech that sounds elaborate does not necessarily signify higher class or intellectual quality.

A businessman recently handed me a letter that he says typifies much language usage in today's business world. It begins: "Reference is made to the above automobile which was purchased at your dealership on November 30, 1988." For two closely typed pages, the author attempts to sound important while he "explains" a simple problem of replacing a fuel pump. Eventually we reach his concluding statement: "I request your explanation in writing that all of the pumps are this way or, however you phrased it, as you again refused replacing this pump saying it was replaced once already." This man seems to believe he knows what he is thinking, but his overelaborate language suggests only confusion.

Look out, warns Kay, for the difference between "speech that is 'better' only in the silly snobbish sense and speech that is in some real sense more effective, which communicates the speaker's message more explicitly and economically." "Bureaucratese," for example, is a "misguided attempt to achieve a high-sounding style" based on someone's confusion about what educated speech really sounds like!

Columnist Russell Baker recently engaged in a bit of elaboration himself when he lambasted some political language: "whiny, oily, sneaky, deceptive words posing as the soul of uptown refinement and civilized polysyllabic politeness." Baker thinks that the public should rise up and protest the meaningless and deadening "cotton wool" that constitutes American political discourse. [20] But how will the upcoming generation know the difference? When teachers tell me that their students seem more inclined to mouth gobbledygook than effective and economical language, I am not terribly surprised. They are, after all, saturated with models of pretension masquerading as precision.

Code-Switching: From "Teenage" to English

To think and express themselves clearly, reason and write well, and understand what middle and high schools expect them to read, children need to learn the codes of formal education. Yet, the communication style of many adolescents, even when they are trying to cope with academic language, is often in the "primitive" category. And because they seem to be less able to "code-switch," they are even more at odds with the adult world than teens of previous eras.

It is nothing new for teenagers to talk differently in English class than when hanging out in the cafeteria. The itchy autonomy of adolescence requires its own lexicon. Yet, in order to adapt to school demands, students must be able to change languages when they cross the border.

Until recently, children growing up could hardly avoid exposure to elaborated codes. In the media, most characters at least tried to talk like grown-ups, and families sat together and discussed what they saw on the news. Time was spent in talking on other occasions, as well. "Kids used to have to be able to code-switch to talk to their grandparents," commented one linguist. "But the grandparents aren't around the house anymore, and if the parents are home, they seem more willing to switch to the kids' form of talk than to try and force the issue."

Now, for a quantity of hours that exceeds that spent in school, even preadolescents are isolated in their own culture. TV and video talk (if they do at all) either in the teens' own language or in the increasingly agrammatical obfuscations of Madison Avenue. With a few notable exceptions, programs rely heavily on picture, gesture, music, and color to get much of the message across. Who needs "talk" containing long clauses, subordinated ideas, and connectives such as "meanwhile," "however," "nevertheless"? Emotionally charged words, not syntax, carry the news. Careful listening becomes irrelevant. Reasoning defers to the surge of immediacy; language use focuses on the literal, the here and now.

Even "literary" models for teenagers are beginning to emphasize the rift with adult culture and its language. In a recent interview, the twenty-five-year-old editor of a new magazine for teenage girls attempted to describe her mission: "Other magazines have, like, a stereotypical or idealized vision of teenagers," she said. "Maybe what parents or teachers would like. Not really what teenagers are about, you know." [21]

School is a foreign country! "It's like, well, you know" does not fly on essay exams. Untrained neural circuits rebel as lectures get longer. Increasingly, students tune out when the teacher talks, avoid literature whenever possible, work silently at their desks or with computer programs, and wait for lunchtime when they can have a "conversation" that makes sense to them.

Should it be any surprise that when they get to the syntax of Mark Twain, the analytic reasoning of math and science textbooks, or the abstract organization needed to write clearly about something not personal or present, they are lost? Their brains have been molded around language, culture, and thought that are alien, even antagonistic, to those of the school.

[admin]

CHAPTER 6: Language Changes Brains

"For heaven's sakes, don't say that kids are becoming more right-brained," pleaded a well-known neuropsychologist when I initially discussed this book with her. "There's been so much garbage published about the hemispheres."

She is right. Although research about the two sides of the cerebral cortex sheds considerable light on different ways in which people learn, it has frequently been oversimplified -- mainly by the notion that people are either "right-brained" or "left-brained." Yes, the two halves of the brain have different modes of responding to experience. Yes, individual people have different ways of using them. Yes, many of our emotional, intellectual, and social differences are related to their intricate balance. But only major surgery can make anyone "right-" or "left-brained."

HALF-BRAINED? WHOLE-BRAINED? [1]

When parents come to me to explain that their child isn't getting along well in her (left-brained) school because she is so right-brained, I hasten to remind them that, like all of us, their child has one fully functioning brain with a right and a left half -- unless, of course, she has a large scar in her scalp.

On the other hand, particular aspects of a child's environment may alter the relative power of these two sides -- and the abilities that go along with them. Learning a language appears to cause some of the most significant changes. The issue of which language and/or dialect is learned is probably much less important than the extent to which refinements of syntax and meaning are mastered. The brain seems to change most dramatically in response to the first language acquired; second-language learning may well be handled by somewhat different areas. So far, neuropsychological research on second-language learning has not come up with any clear-cut explanations.

It appears, once a child has one type of grammatical speech under her belt (actually, under her scalp), the brain is primed to master others more easily at any time during the life span. [2] For this reason, teachers of foreign languages should look warily at children with inadequate mastery of their mother tongues and/or dialects, whatever they may be. How much of students' declining attention to foreign-language study can be attributed to brains that have never been primed by an internal feeling for grammatical relationships is anyone's guess. It goes without saying that parents hiring non-native-speaking caregivers should evaluate their overall linguistic proficiency along with other qualities.

In order to understand how language learning affects the hemispheres and to speculate about what may be happening to the brains of today's youngsters, it is necessary to review the functions of the two sides of the cortex.

The Well-Balanced Mind

So-called right- or left-brained thinking actually fluctuates on a continuum between these two extremes:

Linear, Analytic, Sequential (Left)

vs.

Holistic, Global, Simultaneous (Right)

The left hemisphere works by splitting up, analyzing, and arranging things in an orderly sequence. Because sounds, words, and the grammar of sentences require this type of arrangement, the left hemisphere is specialized in most people, probably from before birth, for speech and several other aspects of language processing. [3] In contrast, the right hemisphere is used to give us the "big picture" or gestalt of a situation. It cannot deal with sequences and fine details (e.g., grammar, word endings, order of sounds, fine motor movements required for writing) or fine-grained listening, but its holistic, visual abilities make it well adapted for many artistic pursuits. This does not mean that English teachers are "left brained" or that artists are "right brained." It may, however, mean that their brains find certain modes of processing more comfortable, so they tend to approach certain types of information with a preferred "style" for learning -- more holistic or more analytical. Nor does it mean that language, per se, is located within the left hemisphere and artistic ability in the right.

All thinking, even language processing, calls upon both hemispheres at the same time. The trick, in a well-functioning brain, is to mix and match the abilities of the two hemispheres so that the most adaptive processing "style" is brought to bear on any learning situation. Since the hemispheres carry on continual and rapid communication over the bridge of fibers (corpus callosum) that connects them, their ability to interact is probably the ultimate key to higher-level reasoning of all kinds. In general, researchers currently believe:

Right Hemisphere

• responds to novelty
• works with wholes, not parts
• is visual, not auditory
• is associated with intuition and the ability to "size up" social situations
• in music, picks up the melody and disregards the lyrics or the sequential details of notation patterns
• is specialized for understanding the relative position of objects in space and mentally turning around three-dimensional figures (remember those items on IQ tests that showed you a funny-looking shape and then asked, "Which one of these, if upside down, would be the same as the first?"). Many video games probably call heavily on these abilities.
• in language processing, is well adapted for:
o understanding general meaning and some aspects of word meaning (e.g., content words)
o getting the "gist" of the speaker's intent
o picking up the contours and melodic pattern of spoken language (prosody)
o gesturing and "body language"
o thinking metaphorically

Left Hemisphere

• deals with "automatic codes" (quick recall of specific words and letters, accurate spelling, math tables)
• analyzes and arranges details in order, e.g., time concepts, cause-and- effect relationships (first X, then Y), and the sequential patterns of small motor movements (e. g., tying shoes, forming letters with a pencil)
• is auditory rather than visual
• in music, it mediates the notation and lyrics rather than the melodic patterns
• in language processing, it mediates:
o fine distinctions between sounds (phonology)
o the order of sounds in words
o the order of words and their relationships (syntax)
o some types of word meaning (e.g., function words)
o other aspects of language comprehension

As both hemispheres work in tandem, they constantly toss the mental ball back and forth as they deal with different aspects of a problem. Some educators have suggested children today are more "right brained" because they rely too heavily on abilities commonly associated with the right hemisphere to handle academic "balls" that should be fielded by the left. It is true that traditional school-oriented tasks such as reading, spelling, computing accurately, writing logically, and reasoning analytically depend heavily on left-hemisphere systems, but they cannot be accomplished without the help of the right. The critical question, therefore, is really not if children are "right brained," but if their environments are equipping them to use both hemispheres interactively.

"STYLES" AND STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING

Most of us have our own "style" for approaching certain types of problems, depending on the way we mobilize the different systems of the two hemispheres. These strategies may or may not be appropriate for the task at hand. For example, some people are inclined to focus on details and accuracy; this approach works well in accounting. It is not adaptive for creating a picture, designing a building, or repairing an engine, activities that are done best by visualizing the configuration of how the details fit together.

The way children deploy these different "styles" influences their success in school. Good spellers can visualize the whole shape of the word and also remember the sound of the details in order. Many poor spellers try to visualize the general outline of words rather than sequencing the details accurately, and the result is often something that looks more like abstract art than orthography. Poor readers deficient in left-hemisphere analytic/sequential processing skills may also rely too heavily on "wholes." They guess at words by their general configuration and don't analyze the order of the sounds or syllables. Language-disabled children who depend on gestures and short phrases, who have difficulty coming up with the word they want ("The um . . . you know . . . thing"), are also believed to have deficiencies in left-hemisphere language areas.

Why do different people use different strategies? Neuropsychologists believe that these different "styles" for learning come both from inherited differences in the brain and from the way a child's experiences train it to work. During development, neurons in both hemispheres must compete for synaptic sites, so the type of input growing brains receive is undoubtedly important for its final hemispheric balance. Learning that builds both analytic and holistic abilities is doubtless good for the brain, but many schools, unfortunately, focus heavily on stuffing in fragments of knowledge at the expense of more general comprehension, e.g.:

• phonics drills without meaningful reading
• repetitive pages of math "facts" lacking word problems or any connection to real objects
• memorization of lists of isolated facts, dates, names, etc.

Yet contemporary life seems to focus on more holistic and visual skills, often at the expense of language and analysis, e.g.:

• video games with lots of novelty and movement
• fast-changing scenes on TV
• music in which lyrics are secondary to the "feel" of the music
• gestural, telegraphic speech

Not only are these two types of training directly in conflict, but we must also ask if we are providing our children sufficient experience with more interactive uses of these different approaches to information. Are we showing them how to link facts and analysis to understanding by giving them interesting problems to solve inside their own heads? Are we encouraging them to make pictures in their minds as they read or listen, and allowing them plenty of time and attention for discussing what they are doing, feeling, or seeing on TV? Are today's environments encouraging the most useful hemispheric development for our society's future needs?

There is virtually no research on normal children to determine how much environments can alter hemispheric balance. Studies of several extreme cases suggest that it can be shifted rather dramatically by early experience. They also show that higher-level language systems of the left hemisphere are particularly vulnerable; with more evidence, we may discover that more complex functioning in both hemispheres and the important connections between them are also experience sensitive.

HEMISPHERES, LANGUAGE, AND PLASTICITY: UNUSUAL CASES

Altered Brains

The growing cortex is so plastic and so intent on being "whole brained" that it tries to reorganize itself even in the face of highly abnormal challenges. One such situation involves drastic surgery in infancy. It is hard to believe that several competent adults, leading normal lives today, are missing one entire half of the cortex because, as infants, they underwent a rare operation in which one hemisphere was removed because of serious disease. Naturally, physicians feared that their patients would have drastic learning problems, but to everyone's astonishment they grew up with what appeared to be quite normal learning skills. Children without a right hemisphere learned to solve visual problems; children without a left hemisphere mastered language, reading, and spelling. Extensive testing has shown that in each case the remaining hemisphere managed to take over many of the functions of the missing one. For a while it appeared as if the brain were almost totally plastic for learning abilities -- as long as the injury occurred early enough, preferably in infancy, and as long as the injury was sufficiently large to impel the brain to reorganize radically.

Later studies have modified this unqualified optimism. In three individuals who have been studied most extensively, all of whom were operated on before the age of five months, it appears that total IQs are not quite as high as would otherwise be expected. Moreover, sensitive tests of language development show that the right hemisphere can compensate for injury to the left only up to a point -- because it simply cannot manage complex syntax. For example, the adults missing their left hemispheres could not use and understand constructions such as passive voice, and they had difficulty judging whether complex sentences were grammatical, partially because of difficulty with function words, one of the left hemisphere's specialties. [4]

"Wild" Children

Three cases of so-called wild children, who grew up without normal human interaction, also show evidence that the ability to use and understand certain aspects of grammar develops fully only if specific parts of the brain are stimulated at the right time. In one famous case, a little girl named Genie was kept in a closet by her psychotic father until she was found at age thirteen, after the critical period for language acquisition had passed. Genie had heard almost no language, understood only a few individual words, and did not speak. Although she showed considerable right-hemisphere development, her left hemisphere seemed to be almost "dead" for some of its usual functions. Genie learned quickly, particularly skills associated with the right hemisphere (e.g., puzzles, mazes, and other signs of nonverbal intelligence). Her brain was also still adaptable enough to master some language, although this kind of learning was much more difficult for her. She developed a vocabulary of content words, but the refinements of speech, function words, and standard grammar continued to elude her. Even after eight years of extensive language therapy her sentences remained "largely agrammatic," according to her devoted therapist, Dr. Susan Curtiss. For example:

"I like hear music ice cream truck."

"Like kick tire Curtiss car."

"Genie have Mama have baby grow up."

Because the neural connections for more advanced syntax were not stimulated before puberty, they appeared to have withered permanently.

In another bizarre case, which occurred in the 1880s, a boy named Kaspar was isolated in a small room from about age three until age sixteen. Although Kaspar only lived for five years after he was found, he showed every evidence of being extremely bright, making striking progress in drawing, reasoning, memory, and even gaining some competence in mathematics. He mastered enough vocabulary in German (his native language) to converse about philosophical issues, but had difficulties with syntax. Function words (e.g., conjunctions, pronouns) were a continuing problem.

A third case, also described by Dr. Curtiss, involves a thirty-year-old hearing-impaired woman named Chelsea, who is now trying to learn language for the first time. Like Genie and Kaspar, Chelsea is having a particularly hard time understanding and speaking grammatically. [5]

It is clearly impossible to compare children in such strange situations to children in more normal settings. Yet this evidence strongly suggests that the acquisition of function words and of syntax -- particularly higher-level forms -- depends on input to the left hemisphere during a certain time in development. Although the brain can probably master new vocabulary at almost any time of life, full development of language is, as Dr. Curtiss says, a "special talent" that we should not take for granted, even in normal children. How much stimulation is needed to keep these circuits alive? No one knows.

Plastic Hemispheres: Evidence From the Hearing Impaired

The severe deprivation of oral language input that is inevitable for hearing-impaired children drastically changes the way their hemispheres mature. The left hemisphere arrives in the world specialized to receive and respond to oral language, but the brains of hearing-impaired children who grow up without this kind of stimulation readapt themselves both structurally and functionally until their hemispheres are quite different from those of children with normal hearing. [6] Moreover, the importance of different types of input at different ages is once again shown by the fact that children who are deaf from birth use their brains quite differently than do those who lose their hearing later on. [7]

Dr. Helen Neville of the Salk Institute in San Diego is one of the foremost researchers studying brain responses of both deaf and hearing children. In several studies she has demonstrated that the auditory areas of deaf brains show characteristic changes. [8] More surprising to the scientists, these children's visual systems are altered as well. "If you're deaf from birth, with no auditory input at all, then the visual system seems to expand and take over regions of the brain that would normally process auditory information. This is another indication of the extreme plasticity in the human brain, and this occurs in a limited time period, probably the first four years," she reports.

Dr. Neville believes her research will eventually have important implications for normal children. "At the moment we can say with certainty that early language and sensory experience can dramatically alter brain development and that different inputs have the ability to make these changes only at certain times in development," she told me. "It will be really important to document precisely what these times are for specific types of input." [9]

For all children, development of language skills is tied up with social, emotional, and motivational factors, scientists emphasize. They theorize that brain responsiveness and variability during critical periods may be related to such aspects of home environment as adult models of language and hours spent watching TV.

Is Eleven Years Old Too Late?

This research also suggests real limits to our window of opportunity for helping children develop good language usage and understanding. There is, of course, a great deal of discussion among researchers about the exact parameters of sensitive periods for language development. It is obviously difficult to conduct such studies with children from "normal" environments. Recently, Dr. Roderick Simonds and Dr. Arnold Scheibel completed a study of the motor-speech area in seventeen normal brains of children aged three months to six years. They acknowledge that their limited number of subjects provide only tentative evidence but are convinced they have found evidence for a "critical window" in language development. Patterns of dendrite branching in these brains appear to have an age-related order of development which is responsive to environmental enrichment. Later-branching systems appear to be most susceptible to environmental input. [10]

Dr. Scheibel is personally convinced that interaction with adults, including language stimulation, is one of the growing brain's most important assets. "Without being melodramatic," he told me, "I think it would be very important to tell parents they are participating with the physical development of their youngsters' brains to the exact degree that they interact with them, communicate with them. Language interaction is actually building tissue in their brains -- so it's also helping build youngsters' futures." [11]

It has been recognized for years that normal children who sustain brain injury, especially before age two, have a good chance of recovering most aspects of language functioning, but rehabilitation becomes much more difficult after adolescence. [12] There are probably many different sensitive periods in language development, which calls on functions of many different brain regions that mature at different times. The same experiences, before, during, or after the sensitive period, may have different effects.

Little experimental data relates to the type of degraded language exposure in a natural environment that today's children may be experiencing. Since one of my favorite jobs is teaching writing to young adolescents, I personally refuse to believe that all hope is lost when we enter the gates of puberty. It does, indeed, take a great deal of time and practice to implant "because" or "although" clauses in unfamiliar neural territory, but it can be done. Often, however, I wish that the syntactic scaffolding were a bit sturdier so that I could spend my precious instructional time in ways other than repairing participles and mending tenses.

I take considerably less pleasure in trying to teach remedial grammar to mainstream university juniors who will be language-arts teachers within two years. Evaluating the written and oral expression of some teachers currently working in the schools can be depressing, too. Who will be available to teach good oral and written expression to the next generation? Could we be witnessing the beginning of a major change in the way the human brain processes information?

LANGUISHING LEFT HEMISPHERES?

Perceptive professionals report that children in classrooms seem to be thinking and learning in increasingly more nonsequential and visual ways. Are shifting environments creating shifts in hemispheric habits? Since research offers interesting clues but no conclusions, we can only speculate on the basis of what is known:

1. Most researchers agree that the hemispheres are specialized differently at birth. What develops is the ability to recruit the most efficient and appropriate strategies for solving the problems the environment sets.

2. High-level thinking in any domain requires using the most appropriate hemispheric strategies and shifting flexibly between strategies when needed.

3. Inability to achieve coordination between hemispheres may jeopardize academic success.

4. The development of each hemisphere as well as their balance of power and their ability to communicate effectively with each other are affected by the growing child's experiences at certain times during development.

5. Higher-level language skills, particularly syntax, use of function words, and the ability to use language analytically, can be accomplished only by the left hemisphere and depend on specific types of input during development. These skills are integral to the elaborated codes used in traditional academic learning.

6. Language that always comes with pictures attached will produce different brain organization than that which must be processed only through the ears.

7. The experiences of children today may be predisposing them to deficits both in effective coordination between hemispheres and in higher-level linguistic and organizational skills of the left hemisphere. They may particularly lack practice in the use of left-hemisphere systems of auditory analysis and in the skills of logical, sequential reasoning.

8. The language of a culture inevitably changes, but current change is accelerated by widespread media communication. The trend toward use of less elaborated codes appears to be creating a severe mismatch between students and their schools. How successfully these skills can be taught to brains that may have passed a "sensitive period" for syntactic development is unknown, but it is presumed to take longer than if input is received during more appropriate times in development.

Even the foremost researchers in the field, such as Dr. Sandra Witelson of the Department of Psychiatry at McMaster University, admit they can only speculate about what is actually happening to growing brains. "From my review of the literature, I don't think one can completely change what the left hemisphere is predisposed to do -- that is, language," Dr. Witelson told me in a telephone interview. "On the other hand, what teachers could be seeing is that children come in with some undeveloped cognitive skills because those cognitive skills, or similar ones, were not introduced or reinforced. It's possible that when a child is given a certain kind of task, he may choose to do it in an analytic or in a holistic, configurational way. They can read in a configurational way, or try to write on the basis of a visual image if they don't have the phonetic code. Then the child could experience difficulty because he's doing things in a different way, not the way the teacher may expect, and possibly not the best way to deal with English." [13]

In summary, it seems clear that a brain's organization, its proficiency with language use and understanding, and its very patterns of thinking may be physically changed to a significant degree by early language environments. By the time we have research to clarify exactly what may be happening to today's children, they will have grown up and become teachers and parents of the next generation. Will they be equipped with brains influenced more by sound and sense or by nonsense?

As we move into our next focus of concern -- how children learn or don't learn to pay attention -- we will see other reasons for the importance of efficient interaction between the hemispheres. It will also become apparent that the left-right distinction represents only part of the story. Other, less popularized dimensions of growing brains are equally critical to learning -- and may be equally at risk.

[admin]

Part Three: ATTENTION, LIFESTYLES, AND LEARNING DISABILITIES

CHAPTER 7: Learning Disabilities: Neural Wiring Goes to School

"How can I teach these kids? They can't pay attention!" An insistent whine of complaint rises and gathers like a sinister haze over classrooms from preschool through college. Rather than serving as a warning, however, it has become a smoke screen for teachers and parents who belabor the young for failing to learn, and for politicians and professors who take potshots at the schools. While the adult community sanctimoniously bewails erosion of academic rigor and achievement, however, it perpetuates the practices that are shortening children's attention spans and rendering their brains unfit to engage in sustained verbal inquiry. Meanwhile, the schools, inundated with students who can't listen, remember, follow sequences of directions, read anything they consider "boring," or solve even elementary problems, have resorted to classifying increasing numbers of students as educationally sick.

"Learning disabilities," both formally diagnosed and unofficially suspected, are now blamed for a large proportion of learning casualties, from "underachievers" to school dropouts. The vast majority involve problems with skills of listening, language, and/or attention. Yet even "normal" students show increasing difficulty keeping their brains focused long enough to learn in traditional ways. Is something wrong with the kids? With their teachers? Or with the "fit" between the brains they bring to school and our expectations for them?

Attention, learning abilities, and learning disabilities are predicated on motivational and cognitive development in the brains of the learners. Each baby brain comes into the world uniquely fitted out for various forms of academic pursuit, but its pedagogical prognosis is largely determined by the ongoing mental traffic that trains it how to think and learn. For children, habits of the mind soon become structures of the brain -- and they absorb their habits, either directly or indirectly -- from the adult culture that surrounds them. For many, the habits of the mind that they take with them to school predispose them for trouble.

To understand the growing number of educational casualties today, we must face some often unrecognized realities about the brain-culture partnership. Particularly troublesome are some new factors that fuel the anomalous category of "learning disability," for which children are treated with educational prescriptions, and its frequent companion, "attention deficit disorder," for which many receive brain-altering drugs. Here are some questions that we need to address in these three chapters:

1. What is the real meaning of the term "learning disability" and why are there now so many in our schools?

2. Do children inherit learning problems -- or are they caused by the environments in which they grow up?

3. What is an "attention deficit"? Why do increasing numbers of children seem to have them?

4. Should children receive drugs because they can't pay attention in school?

5. What are the physical foundations of attention and how can they be damaged by toxic and noisy environments or sedentary lifestyles?

6. What is the role of the home in preventing attention and learning problems?

7. What does attention have to do with our current crisis in "problem solving"?

A RISING TIDE OF DISABILITY

The problem of getting students to sit still, pay attention in class, and reflect thoughtfully on the task at hand figures prominently, along with reading difficulty, in an astonishing "epidemic" of "learning disability" in otherwise able children. Since the 1970s when the label, popularly referred to as "LD," became an accepted designation for problems not attributed to intelligence, physical, or emotional status, this loosely defined diagnostic category has grown geometrically. It now includes some children who might previously have been categorized as mentally deficient or emotionally disturbed as well as a large number who are having trouble in school for reasons that are often unclear.

Many students with specific difficulties in learning never make it into the maze of psycho-educational testing that leads to official diagnosis, but the number who do is rapidly becoming unmanageable. In the United States from 1976 to 1985, there was a 135% jump in diagnosed cases of learning disability from 796,596 to 1,868,447. [1] By 1988, Dr. Margaret C. Wang, a noted learning-disability educator, observed that up to 15,000 children nationwide per week were being referred for assessment. She warned that a "second system" of children with special learning needs was developing within the regular educational system. [2] This "second system," incidentally, is not an economic dumping ground; the diagnosis of "learning disability" has been a predominantly middle-class phenomenon.

Dr. Wang points out that up to 80% of American schoolchildren could now be diagnosed as learning disabled by one or more of the methods used, which may vary even between adjacent school districts. It is impossible to determine how much of the avalanche of new referrals is attributable to teachers' growing reliance on this method of extruding troublesome youngsters from classrooms. The only clear fact that can be derived from these statistics is that there is a serious misfit between large numbers of children and their schools.

"ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER"

In a great proportion of diagnosed cases, a subcategory of learning disability variously named "hyperactivity" or, more currently, "attention deficit disorder -- with or without hyperactivity" is implicated, even when the primary difficulty lies in a specific academic territory such as reading. All "attention deficit disorder" cases have trouble focusing and maintaining attention appropriately; the term "hyperactivity" implies that the child's body, as well as mind, is bouncing off walls. One of the most invariable school symptoms of any form of attention disorder is difficulty listening attentively and remembering what the teacher says.

The exact relationship between "ADHD" (attention deficit with or without hyperactivity disorder) and other forms of "LD" is unclear, but experts estimate a 50% to 90% overlap between the two categories. [3] The impossibility of finding clear data is a frustrating testimony to the imprecision of educational diagnosis, but unquestionably, one of the main reasons the "LD" category is growing so large is because of a dramatic increase in the number of children with "attention disorders."

Flaky Kids and Pharmaceuticals

Currently in the United States, anywhere from one and one-half million to four and one-half million schoolchildren, mainly boys, bear the official diagnosis of ADHD. Incredibly, in some classrooms, more than 50% of students have been diagnosed as hyperactive, a fact rendered less surprising by a recent report that pointed out that one-third of all American boys meet some of the criteria. [4] Teachers say, however, that the identified cases represent only the most serious and unmanageable ones in an increasingly inattentive population of students. Girls are also more inattentive these days, but partially because they do not tend to cut up as much in class, they are referred for diagnosis less often.

In other parts of the world the incidence of ADHD is seen as being much lower, but rising numbers of cases have recently been reported from countries as widely separated as Finland and the People's Republic of China, to name just two examples. [5, 6] A West German pediatrician specializing in the disorder recently published a study of a thousand children whom he had treated for attention disorders, many from upper-middle-class families. [7]

One controversial aspect of this problem is an increasing use of stimulant drugs to enable these children's brains to behave more attentively. As of this writing, an estimated 6% of American schoolchildren are being given a prescription drug, most commonly Ritalin, to render them sufficiently manageable to do their work in school. In some communities, where certain pediatricians have "specialized" in "hyperactivity"/attention deficits, the percentage is much higher. Some parents are also choosing to augment the prescribed daily dosage to counteract the drug's "rebound" effect and enable their offspring to manage themselves acceptably at home. A 1988 article in Education Week entitled "Debate Grows on Classroom's 'Magic Pill'" pointed out that the production of Ritalin in the United States doubled between 1985 and 1987. [8] In the next chapter we will take an in-depth look at this whole issue. For now, let us explore the more general range of "learning disabilities."

"LD": MISFITTED BRAINS

Different Wiring Systems

I find that parents, and even teachers, are often confused by the term "learning disability." Contrary to what many have been led to believe, most children diagnosed as "LD" have not suffered any identifiable kind of brain "damage" either before or after birth. Moreover, they may be highly intelligent. Some nervous systems come into the world jumpy, clumsy, or otherwise ill-equipped for learning, but many children who wear the label "LD" do not have anything noticeably the matter with them. Even in neurological examination they may seem to be essentially "normal" children who function well in most settings -- except for the classroom. It is especially hard for adults to understand why such a child should have difficulty with specific aspects of learning such as reading, math, memory, and paying attention.

Also contrary to popular belief, once a diagnosis is arrived at, professionals cannot simply "fix" the child just because they have put a label on the problem. Unfortunately, understanding of the vagaries of the learning brain is so tenuous that most treatment is still based more on "what works" than on a clear-cut neurological rationale.

The main reason diagnosis and treatment are so difficult is that all kids' brains are unique -- the LD child's is just too unique for the school to handle. Even though all our brains are cut from the "Homo sapiens" template, each responds individually to different types of tasks, and each is potentially better at making synaptic connections for some kinds of learning than for others. The basic neuronal wiring diagram is determined both by the genetic blueprint and the environment in the womb; the postnatal environment helps determine how the connections get hooked up -- according to how the child uses them. By definition, a specific "learning disability" occurs only when the child takes that special brain into a learning situation, batters his neuron assemblies against a certain kind of demand -- and fails. In an extreme example, let us imagine that a child with a brain specifically ill-equipped for reading went to school in a society where all information was conveyed pictorially or by storytelling. The "learning disability" would never materialize!

Even in preschool years, a child's mental life and motivation interact with basic brain structure to shape specific talents for learning. By the time children enter school, each has a singular pattern of abilities, disabilities, and interests. Some children's patterns fit neatly into the classroom; others' talents show up more clearly on the playground, in the art or music room, in interpersonal politics, or when someone needs a friend. But these skills don't earn stars on the spelling chart -- or many A's on the report card.

Some LD youngsters have wiring systems that must struggle harder with learning because of general difficulty with one or several of the following: memory, coordination of hands and eyes, rapid comprehension of new situations, language, visual-spatial reasoning, abstract thinking, or ability to focus attention quickly and appropriately. Even a problem that appears to be quite generalized, however, such as a memory problem, may actually show up only in particular (task specific) types of learning situations. Many times, when students come to me to complain about a "memory problem," it turns out they are really talking about verbal memory for things they read or hear; they may be terrific at remembering where Dad mislaid his car keys or how to put a Rubik's Cube together. The real "problem" is that brain systems are wired up better for some types of memory than for others, and the weak ones don't show up until they are called on to perform.

Sometimes I reflect ruefully, when I watch children trundled off to the "resource room" for tutoring in reading or spelling, that I, too, might have been LD. Like many who later chose teaching as a career, I was lucky that my brain's native abilities and my language-rich environment combined to fit me out quite nicely for my first-grade classroom. If at age six, however, I had suddenly been dropped into a society of visual artists, with a curriculum that consisted of drawing pictures and designing architectural blueprints instead of reading and spelling, I would shortly have been consigned to the "disabled" list. Wallowing messily in failed expectations, I would have waited for the weekly visit of the special reading teacher and my brief taste of success -- that is, if the verbal "frills" hadn't already been cut from the school budget. Many children who face the opposite problem in our language-centered schools pine for the "frills" of art or music class but have little opportunity to be recognized for their talents. Are these students' brains "damaged" -- or just disabled relative to that particular curriculum?

Should we change the curriculum? Must we alter teaching methods and the pace of instruction to accommodate growing numbers of "different" brains? These questions are increasingly being forced on teachers, who, even in the "best" schools, are discovering that giving students more of the usual types of instruction does not backfill the gaps. Meanwhile, the society clamors for higher standards -- and our graduates can't compete in world markets.

Perhaps the American popular culture ought to take a hard look at its own curriculum. Because the kind of "coaching" provided by early environments has so much to do with a child's adjustment to school learning, everyone has an obligation to our children -- and to their future teachers -- to provide them with experiences likely to build the skills they will need in the classroom. This does not mean that parents should prepare lesson plans for infants, expect preschoolers to read, or drill kids on math facts when they are in their high chairs. It does mean someone must help them learn to listen, direct their own thinking, and use language effectively. I have already described the erosion of language stimulation for many children today; now let us explore more fully the ways in which environments are teaching them not to pay attention. These two problems are closely related and may account for much of this mysterious "epidemic" we are now experiencing.

Listening Skills and Learning Disabilities

By far the majority of learning disability referrals include difficulty listening to, understanding, or expressing verbal material, reading, writing, and spelling. These skills all rest on an underlying complex of "auditory processing abilities" and are mediated by language areas in the brain's left hemisphere. They include abilities to:

• listen carefully to the order of sounds in words or of words in sentences
• discriminate between similar sounds (e.g., sh and ch)
• remember things that have just been heard ("short-term auditory memory")

Problems with the above do not stem mainly from defects in the ears, but from the brain's processing centers. The sounds may get in, but they become scrambled or lost before they can be analyzed, understood, and remembered. One of the most prevalent symptoms of such problems is difficulty in recalling spoken directions. For example:

Parent: "Please go upstairs, get the soap out of the closet, and bring it to the laundry room."

Child: "Huh?"

Children with poor auditory skills -- whatever the reason -- have a difficult time learning to read, spelling accurately, remembering what they read long enough to understand it, or retaining the internal sound of a sentence they want to write down. They tend to tune out during class discussions and when the teacher lectures or gives directions. They respond much better to visual input, particularly if it is in pictorial rather than written form.

To compound the difficulty, children who do not have to listen can easily develop habits to avoid exercising (and thus building) these important auditory-processing connections. The very act of remembering lays down physical tracks in the brain, but children can quite easily avoid having to build these systems. When a teacher gives directions, they watch her for clues or look around to see what everyone else is doing (now that so many seem to have this problem, sometimes no one knows!). They say "Huh?" enough times to make frazzled parents either show them or do it themselves. When they don't hear the homework assignment in class, they call a friend. In reading they rely heavily on pictures in the text. Most children get the message more from the pictures than from "talk" when they watch TV, so extended viewing -- particularly in early years when these brain connections are forming -- compounds the problem. No wonder, when they have to read longer stories, math word problems, history books, etc., they can't hold the sound of the words inside their own heads long enough to understand what they're reading! Their brains have simply not been trained to understand and retain discourse.

What causes the basic weakness? Research suggests this type of problem may tend to run in some families. Nowadays, however, when most children's listening experiences are limited or attached to pictures, it is difficult to sort out who inherited the problem and who "caught" it from the environment. Whatever the cause, studies have shown that early experience with careful, analytic listening can dramatically improve auditory processing, listening comprehension, and in turn, reading ability -- even in children with an inherited weakness. [9]

HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND "EXCEPTIONAL BRAINS"

Scientists are trying to get more specific about how nature and nurture affect patterns of learning ability. They have found that "exceptionality" (such as musical, mathematical, or linguistic talent, as well as some categories of learning disability) may be related to inherited differences in the way brains are constructed. Nevertheless, the effects of environments created by family members with particular interests can't be discounted, say Drs. Lorraine Obler and Deborah Fine in their fascinating book The Exceptional Brain. "Stating that a talent or disability is biologically or genetically based does not mean that it will necessarily develop or fail to develop regardless of the conditions under which a child grows up. Certain environmental factors are crucial for the manifestation of talent as they are for the manifestation of disability." [10]

Genes, Dyslexia, and the Fetal Brain

It is difficult and highly technical work to sort out the respective effects of genes and family habits, agrees Dr. Bruce Pennington of the University of Colorado. Dr. Pennington is director of a large study searching for specific genes by which language, reading, and learning disabilities can be transmitted from parent to child. Just because many members of a family have a certain trait, he says, we cannot assume it is necessarily genetic. After all, poor table manners can run in families!" [11] Likewise, parents who enjoy reading and conversation will tend to surround their children with a literacy-rich environment and extensive listening experiences, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, Pennington's research, the largest family learning-disability study ever conducted, has confirmed that some specific types of learning difficulties, including language disorders such as stuttering, speech, and some reading problems, are genetically influenced. Members of these families, interestingly enough, are often distinguished by talents in other areas. As researchers work to clarify definitions and probable causes, they are uncovering some fascinating clues about why this might be true.

The term "dyslexia" has often been used as a garbage can for any kind of problem with reading. Current research, however, has limited the use of the term to describe a brain-based disorder in putting together the sight and sound of printed language in reading, spelling, and writing (e.g., looking at a letter and saying its sound; remembering how to write said). Dyslexic children, who compose only one special segment of the entire LD population, may also have difficulty with some aspects of oral language, such as coming up quickly with the word they want to say or getting the order of the sounds and syllables straight. Because they tend to mix up the order of letters and words when they read (and sometimes the order of numerals when they do arithmetic), people used to think the problem was in their eyes. Now it is suspected that the culprits really are deficits in left-hemisphere systems responsible for analyzing and arranging things in sequential order and linking sound with written symbol.

Even with their genetically "different" brains, dyslexic children who come from homes where they have been exposed to books and good examples of language often learn to read reasonably well. Although their spelling is often "atrocious," these youngsters may escape diagnosis as they learn to compensate for or cover up their difficulties. They also prove that "disability" is a relative term, as they are often talented in more predominantly right-hemisphere skills, such as visual arts, mathematical reasoning, music, mechanical aptitude. [12]

Attention problems in school frequently accompany dyslexia, but dyslexics often have excellent visual attention for details of things they see (other than printed words!), and they can spend long hours in activities such as working on an engine or a design. They are youngsters who might be academic stars in a culture with a different set of intellectual priorities.

How are these brains different? Studies using new computerized pictures of brain areas in action show that dyslexic children seem to use different neural systems for reading than do "normal" readers. [13] A second line of evidence suggests that this mix-up takes place because certain brain areas developed differently before birth. Because the young brain is so plastic, it manages to reorganize itself around reading, but academic skills still suffer to some degree.

"A Terrible-Looking Brain"

Not long ago, the late Dr. Norman Geshwind and his colleague Dr. Albert Galaburda, of Harvard University, began intensive work on the brains of several dyslexics who had willed them for study. All of these brains differed in particular ways from the "normal" pattern of cell organization, especially in one general language area of the left hemisphere. Microscopic analysis pinpointed the origin of the differences at a certain period of prenatal cell migration. Instead of finding their intended homes, groups of neurons ended up in peculiar places and arrangements. Moreover, areas in the right hemisphere -- the ones, in fact, that would probably underlie visual, mechanical, or other creative abilities -- were proportionately larger in these people. [14]

Given the growing evidence that dyslexia tends to run in families and to be more evident in males, Dr. Geshwind decided to interview families of dyslexics. When he uncovered repeated prevalence of left-handed relatives and autoimmune, or allergic, disease, he developed a theory. He speculated that imbalances of hormones or antibodies secreted by the mother at different times during pregnancy might subtly rearrange the infant's brain in ways that would make it less adept at reading and language, more talented in visual-spatial skills, and more likely to be left-handed. [15, 16]

No final answers are yet available, but this research is being continued by Dr. Albert Galaburda. Until more is known, these studies provide powerful evidence that even though baby brains are born with differences, they can eventually learn to accomplish a complex learning task (in this case, reading) with brain systems different -- and perhaps geographically far removed -- from the ones best suited for the job. The scientists working on these projects agree that the way dyslexics -- or anyone else -- use their brains is a critical factor in modifying them.

I had an opportunity to chat with Dr. Galaburda after a recent speech in which he emphasized "the Darwinian-like interaction" between the environment and the growing brain. Genes provide the environment with "a range of structures to choose from," he explained, "and the environment chooses from this range of possibilities. The structure of your brain determines that you can dance, but it doesn't permit you to fly," he said, smiling. ''There are some things the genes just don't permit. But on the other hand, the brain is not prewired to act just one way; instead it gives the environment certain flexibility in selection. I think even if children have not quite the best wiring diagram for something, you can make it look better or less well depending on the environment. [17]

"Different kinds of environmental factors, from chemicals to societal pressures . . . are potentially capable of resulting in abnormal brain interactions," explained Dr. Galaburda. On the other hand, his studies of dyslexic brains have reminded him that we should never underestimate the ability of the brain, given the right kind of support, to compensate for innate difficulties. "If you change the brain [before birth] you probably change the range of possibilities that are available to this brain in some sense, but the range of possibilities is still very great. One of our dyslexics was a very distinguished, famous, brilliant psychologist and she had a terrible-looking brain!" [18]

The Flip Side of Dyslexia: Nonverbal Learning Disorders

Scientists are hot on the trail of brain differences that lie behind another difficulty, termed "nonverbal learning disorder," which seems to stem from the opposite problem: insufficient right-hemisphere power.

People with right-hemisphere disabilities may be quite competent at linear, sequential skills like spelling, reading out loud, or doing basic math equations, but have trouble when they must comprehend abstract ideas, relate to people socially, or reason in a visual-spatial format (e. g., maps, charts, three-dimensional puzzles, architectural drawings). They have trouble understanding the relationship of their bodies in space or the ideas in literature or social studies. They almost invariably run afoul of more advanced math courses. Their primary difficulty is one of seeing the "whole picture" of a situation: sizing up meaning when they read or when they deal with others, for example. They may have trouble interpreting the emotional quality of people's facial expressions and do or say inappropriate things in social situations. [19]

[A Cautionary Note: Most of us lean toward one "style" or another but are still well within the normal range; just because any of these descriptions sound like someone you know does not mean they have a brain disability, just that they are at a different point on a continuum than someone else. The fact that we all have unique patterns of talents keeps us supplied with people who want to be proofreaders as well as those who prefer architectural design.]

Serious cases of nonverbal learning disorder, in which the individual's abilities are obviously affected, are just now receiving professional attention. Little is known about causes or treatment, but researchers suggest early intervention to help the brain develop connections for manipulating the physical world and understanding other people's reactions and the principles behind ideas.

Children who show this type of learning profile may not look "disabled" in early grades and are often, in fact, viewed as quite advanced because of large vocabulary, facility on the computer, early reading of words, and good math computation skills. The tipoff is that they tend to pursue linear kinds of learning, like computer math or spelling drills, as obsessively as they avoid such visual-spatial challenges as video games, team sports, or mechanical puzzles. [20] Since the child's family may share some of the same characteristics, manual and interpersonal abilities may not have high priority at home.

Nonverbal learning disorders and dyslexia are just two of the many conditions that get lumped under the term "LD" (and which may or may not include "attention deficit" problems), but they are among the major ones for which specific, and possibly inherited, brain differences have been suggested. No one knows how many "learning disabilities" are caused by environments that interact with more "normal" brain patterns to make children unprepared for school learning. Most experts agree, however, that this number is probably growing. Because the types of technology needed to look, literally, at the learning brain are only now being developed and are expensive, it will be a long time before we fully understand the normal learning process, let alone all its variations. A few scientists have already begun the quest.

Looking Inside the Brain

At Michigan State University, Dr. E. James Potchen, chairman of the Department of Radiology, works at the forefront of these efforts. He directs a project in which magnetic resonance imaging, a method of seeing the working brain in "exquisite detail," as he says, is being used to probe the relationship of brain structure and learning disability.

Dr. Potchen has looked at 18,000 brains, and says that "we are all abnormal because all brains are so different. It's amazing we do as well as we do." Having brain differences should not necessarily be viewed as having a disease, he maintains, and there can be tremendous changes in the architecture of the brain from learning. He guesses the child's brain is always in the process of being rewired.

Dr. Potchen tells of both animal and human brains that have restructured themselves significantly on the basis of learning experiences. Some types of birds even develop new neurons when they learn to sing. In a human experiment he showed pictures of a stick figure to doctors and artists while their brain activity was being scanned. Different areas of the cortex would "light up" depending on the individual's profession. The artists, looking at the drawing, showed brain patterns indicating greater complexity of association and understanding.

This curious researcher has also been examining his own brain every four years to look for changes. "I haven't yet got to the point where I can see that if my golf swing got better, it would change my brain, but that may be coming -- especially for children." [21]

FITTING BRAINS TO LEARNING -- AND FITTING LEARNING TO BRAINS

Research like Dr. Potchen's has obvious promise for educators, but we are still a long way from being able to plan teaching on the basis of brain scans. In the meanwhile, this research should certainly sensitize us to the fact that learning environments -- at home or school -- can partially rearrange neural wiring diagrams. They can help the child overcome or compensate for innate differences or predispose to problems. In our schools, children who come with deficits in auditory attention and language processing are headed for trouble.

As I learn more about the wide variety of ways in which students' brains may differ from each other's -- and from my own -- I become increasingly aware of the importance of the "fit" between their brains' particular contours and the learning environment into which they have been injected. Now, when I walk into a classroom of twenty students, be they four- or forty-year-olds, I remind myself that I am trying to teach twenty individual brains that are probably as different in their learning patterns as my students' faces are in appearance. As a teacher, I must accept the fact that their level of success -- and thus their motivation -- will be directly related to the accommodation we mutually achieve between the subject matter and their particular pattern of abilities. I must encourage them to push themselves a little harder on things that do not come so easily, but I must also accept the necessity of supporting and working to develop each student's potential. Even with twenty students, which is fewer than the number found in most classrooms, this job requires skill, patience, and a lot of hard work.

If we could, as teachers, fill this awesome assignment, I venture to say both the number of "learning disabilities" and the dropout rate would decline precipitously. Our job is getting increasingly difficult, however, because we seem to be standing in the way of an avalanche of brains that are misfitted to our educational objectives. A teacher can easily become engulfed trying to reconcile administrators' demands for "achievement" with today's language and attention patterns. Unless the adult community decides to help us wrap these growing brains in the mental garments of language, reflection, and thought, I fear we will continue to see increasing numbers of children categorized as "educationally sick."

[admin]

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER 8: Why Can't They Pay Attention?

The reason our children don't follow directions is that they're tuned out. These children don't listen. They have so much stimulation --they're used to the TV blaring, the stereo, the household commotion. I'm not sure so many are ADHD; they're just restless because they don't have anything inside. They're so used to being-entertained. -- EIGHTH-GRADE TEACHER, SUBURBAN SCHOOL, GEORGIA

They have a much better store of general information than children twenty years ago. If they listen, they can follow directions, but it is difficult to keep their attention long enough to explain what to do. -- TEACHER, UNGRADED RURAL SCHOOL, MINNESOTA

The kids are sharp and intuitive, but -- listening skills? Not as good as students in the past. Some seem to have forgotten how to learn without visual stimulation and affirmation of what they hear. Concentration and memory are just not as important to them. They seem to have their own agendas in life, and school gets in the way sometimes. -- FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER, URBAN SCHOOL, OREGON

FIGURE 3 [Teacher] Students, turn to page 94. You will need a pencil, paper and your ruler. [Girl] What else do I need besides a pencil and paper? [Boy] What page did you say that was? [Boy] Do we need our books? [Boy] What page? Courtesy of Dodie Corpening and Gifted, Created and Talented Magazine.

THE PROBLEM OF ATTENTION

Although "attention deficits" are involved in the vast majority of learning-disability referrals, teachers of all students complain more about diminished attention spans than about any other characteristic of their students. As soon as I began to talk with educators, I discovered that merely mentioning the word "attention" opened a floodgate of response. To my surprise, I also heard the same concerns expressed from abroad, although in other countries the diagnosis of "learning disability" and ADHD are much less prevalent.

In Tours, a large city southwest of Paris, the director of a primary school and an instructor in the highly esteemed Ecole Normale (Teachers' College), told me, "The teachers here complain a lot; they say the children don't listen anymore, they are restless. This is only my personal opinion, but I think one learns not to listen when one watches television. I think the children get in the habit and then when the teacher talks, they don't hear her either." She went on to describe other concerns remarkably similar to those I was hearing at home about hurried lifestyles, overprogrammed children, and the decline of thoughtful conversations around the family dinner table. "Personally, I don't think the parents encourage calmness or listening," she mused. [1]

It is clear from the preceding comments that declining listening abilities are the main symptom, but most teachers sense that they also reflect students' problems with focusing and maintaining internal control of attention in any situation. Overall mental restlessness and inability to persist in solving problems, reading "hard" books, or doing work perceived as "boring" are even more serious symptoms. In the United States a national crisis in "problem-solving ability" -- the ability to stay focused long enough to reason out and solve a mental challenge -- has become the primary agenda item of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Could these trends simply represent inevitable signs of progress? Will children be better off if they learn early to respond to the pace of the contemporary world? Certainly, to be adapted to today's surroundings, young brains need to deal with a lot of rapid-fire stimuli. To reason effectively and solve problems, however, growing minds also need to be able to retain and connect these "bits." Perhaps most important, they need to learn what it feels like to be in charge of one's own brain, actively pursuing a mental or physical trail, inhibiting response to the lure of distractions.

Attention determines how and what an individual learns. [2] It enables us to make choices and maintain control over what we notice, absorb, and remember. Children with attention problems fall into two general categories: some are too mentally active, with their focus jumping from one thing to another, while others behave as if their brains were underactive. Those in the latter group frequently are termed "spaced out," but they are much less frequently diagnosed than the "hyper" ones, who respond impulsively to whatever can be touched or seen in their environments and have particular difficulty internalizing personal controls. [3] Those with serious disorders often grow up to be impulsive adults; ADHD is statistically linked with delinquency and antisocial behavior. If our society wants citizens who can reflect as well as respond, who can come up with solutions to the problems of a complex world, it must teach its children to stop, listen, and think as well as to react.

How can we help children learn to direct their mental energies? How much can the environment affect patterns of attention, listening, and problem-solving? Let us consider first what is known about attention and why physicians prescribe drugs for some children who lack it. Then we will start to take a look at what environments, both physical and mental, have to do with the way it develops -- or fails to -- during childhood.

What Is an Attention Deficit?

Attention, like learning disability, is not a single measurable quantity. Although psychologists are far from agreeing on an exact definition, they have generally believed, as far as learning is concerned, that selective attention -- the ability to concentrate and stay focused on a particular task -- is the critical issue. [4] But selective attention has proven hard to measure. Like memory, it is "task specific," changing according to the job the brain is asked to do and the underlying motivation to do it. For example, many teachers who complain that students can't pay attention and listen in class also notice that the same children will concentrate on a computerized video game for long periods of time. In these two situations there are clear differences between both motivational and cognitive factors such as auditory or visual attention, saliency (attention-grabbing quality) of the stimulus, requirements for memory, physical involvement, and the pace of the activity, all of which affect attention.

For all learners, attention varies from situation to situation, and it is difficult to determine the fine line between normal restlessness and pathology. Now that so many children seem out of sync with the attentional demands of their classrooms, the problem is compounded. Even the extreme diagnosis of "ADHD" -- which assumes that the child has some sort of organic brain dysfunction -- depends on rather vague criteria, since there are no surefire neurological tests to prove its existence.

To diagnose a child as pathologically inattentive most doctors depend mainly on behavior checklists filled out by teachers and parents; the official diagnosis is often subjective. A certain proportion of items like the following must be checked:

• failure to finish things he or she starts
• failure to listen
• difficulty in concentrating or sticking to an activity
• acting before thinking
• shifting between one activity and another
• difficulty in organization
• calling out in class/difficulty awaiting turns

To earn the additional designation "hyperactive," the child must also show excessive physical activity (e.g., run or climb excessively).

Since all children exhibit these behaviors at times, the diagnosis is supposed to be restricted to problems that are unusually severe for the child's age and level of mental development. Curiously, however, doctors are told that the child may seem perfectly normal during the office visit, since ADHD children are often able to control themselves in novel or one-to-one situations. [5]

Controlling Attention: From Inside or Outside?

Ritalin and other drugs prescribed for ADHD are variations on the type of stimulants, or amphetamines, banned in over-the-counter diet pills. They help heighten and sharpen attention -- even in many "normal" people. Some children with organic difficulties seem to benefit from carefully regulated doses that enable them to focus appropriately, listen more carefully to the teacher, and complete more work. In fact, moderate doses would have the same effect on almost anyone -- at least for a while -- and many doctors complain that the number of children treated is much larger than it should be. Some physicians, parents, and teachers are too eager, they say, to give children drugs with well-recognized negative side effects, instead of working to help them learn to manage their own behavior.

Many children diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder are extremely intelligent, but there is some reason to doubt the overall benefit of drug treatment alone in helping them use that intelligence productively. Students who take their medication do become more tractable, completing more repetitive "work" such as worksheets with fill-in answers and drills on math problems. In most studies conducted thus far, however, drugs per se do not make them score better on tests of academic achievement or of higher-level thinking and problem-solving. [6] Some studies have even shown that the level of dosage needed to make teachers approve a child's behavior is so high that it actually dulls reasoning ability. These findings raise questions, not only about the type of "work" dominating many classrooms, but also about the real source of the problem. [7]

Lasting improvement is generally not seen after the drug treatment is stopped. A few children appear spontaneously to "outgrow" attention problems around adolescence, probably because of nervous-system maturation, but many retain problems of self-control that persist into adulthood.

"Curing" attention problems seems to be close to impossible. Teaching students to talk through problems, thus developing conscious strategies for self-control, is the only therapy used thus far that appears to produce results lasting after drugs are discontinued. [8-10] In fact, this sort of "cognitive therapy" -- using language to control behavior -- has been shown to help even without drug treatment. Some professionals have gone so far as to suggest that the real disability is a lack of this type of teaching -- both at home and at school.

Misfitted Attention: What Is the Real Problem?

Since most of the "epidemic" of inattention cannot be linked to proven organic dysfunction of the central nervous system, other factors that create a misfit between the children's development and the demands of the schools are being considered. According to the newest research, a small percentage of problems called ADHD may be covering up basic anxiety or depression. [11] Many more may be related to other, environmental causes. Overall a confusing picture emerges.

In her book, When Children Don't Learn, Dr. Diape McGuinness expresses skepticism about the validity of the diagnosis itself. "Problems in the control of attention could result from deficiencies in the central nervous system, which could produce distractibility, failure to sustain attention to a task, inability to plan actions, and a diminished attention span. However, similar difficulties could be created by an environment that is either too overwhelming or insufficiently compelling [emphasis added]," she states. [12] Dr. McGuinness, who confesses she is irate about the amount of Ritalin being prescribed today, believes that many children thought to be "hyperactive" are really normally vigorous children "who refuse to abide by adult admonitions to sit still and conform to rules set by adults for their own convenience." She makes the point that children's bodies are designed by nature to be active, and the overly wiggly ones may really know what is good for them more than the docile types "who are overly conforming and remain for hours in sedentary positions."

Under some circumstances (such as in the doctor's office), even children labeled ADHD are able to control their attention -- but only if the situation is novel, one-on-one, and they get frequent and continuous rewards and reinforcement of some kind. For example, they can pay excellent attention to computer activities with frequent token rewards (e.g., a laser gun blows up a space invader every time the student gets a math problem correct), and their schoolwork improves noticeably when someone works individually with them. In one interesting study, children diagnosed ADHD were paid to respond quickly and accurately to a test on which they had previously scored quite poorly when no reward was offered. Much to the experimenter's surprise, promise of money brought their performance up to the level of a normal control group. [13]

These findings and others have led a number of professionals to begin rethinking their views. Dr. Russell Barkley, nationally noted authority and author of Hyperactive Children, recently told a large group of educators that he is changing his mind about what an "attention deficit" really is. [14] "If you have an attention deficit, shouldn't it show up everywhere? If language is impaired, we see language impairment anywhere the child needs to use language. How can this be an attention deficit? Don't we need to look for something else that explains this variation? Why do they do better with novel situations, with rich schedules of reinforcement [frequent rewards]? People are seriously questioning whether this is really an attention deficit."

One theory, according to Dr. Barkley, is that the ADHD children have particular trouble with what he calls "rule-governed behavior." When the environment demands adherence to a rule, especially one with few consequences, trouble begins. "So when a teacher says, 'He's not paying attention,' what she really means is he's not listening, he's not following the rule. 'I told him to go back to his desk, get out his math problems, and work on them, and he didn't do the rule.'

"It's been shown that when ADHD children are paying attention to what they like, they don't have an attention deficit," he emphasized. "So if they brought a car from home, or a transformer, or they're doodling war pictures on the corner of that reading workbook -- their attention span for war pictures is phenomenal! But it isn't for the stuff you ask them to do. The problem, then, is not attention, it's a disability in rule-following."

However, even these children can follow rules if there is an immediate reward, Dr. Barkley has observed. "In adults, we are the only animal that operates on a very sparse schedule of reward; I only get a paycheck once a month, but I show up at work every day. There is something fascinating about the human brain that allows it to be exquisitely sensitive to extremely sparse schedules of reward, but that is something that has to develop. Young children can't do it. You can tell a young kid you'll take him to Disneyland in February, and that won't do it. These ADHD kids are like younger kids; they need immediate feedback and reinforcement."

Why might this be the case? Dr. Barkley suggests, for some children, underlying differences in the motivational-control systems of the brain may not be operating normally; thus they need a much stronger external impetus to concentrate on the task at hand. They simply don't respond as other children do to "social approval."

"Somehow, neurologically, these children have a threshold for what rewards them that is set too high; it takes a more powerful reinforcer to get them to do what they are told. That is why they require the money, food, bikes, toys, privileges, bribes -- to work. Because the subtle rewards -- love of learning, grades, teacher approval -- don't motivate these kids at all. You can say 'good boy, good boy' all you want and that isn't going to work."

"They can understand what you say to them," he points out, "they just don't act on it. It's really a problem with how language governs behavior -- the connections between the linguistic and the motor systems." [15]

Dr. Barkley suspects there is a genetic cause for these brain differences, possibly related to the way chemicals (neurotransmitters) help different parts of the brain work together. Children who develop the most severe forms of ADHD so that they become openly "oppositional" and often delinquent, tend to come from families with a history of alcohol abuse, delinquency, and antisocial behavior, which he thinks may reflect some overall type of inherited problem. We can't blame parents for the fact that they have a difficult child, he insists, but we must acknowledge that a child's environment helps determine how the problem is expressed. As with bad table manners that seem to run in families, no one has been able to measure exactly how much living with impulsive adults in poorly structured situations contributes to the problem.

Obviously, no clear-cut answers about the "why" of attention problems are available. Perhaps neurology is just struggling to catch up with common sense, for it seems foolish to deny that the way a child is taught and shown to behave has a lot to do with whether or not he learns to manage himself without an immediate reward. A number of practical, real-life studies show that children's adult models may be a significant, but frequently unappreciated, variable. [16]

FURNISHING THE EXECUTIVE SUITE: HOW BRAINS LEARN TO PAY ATTENTION

Both physical and mental environments help develop the ability to pay attention. Because attention requires the use of many different areas of the brain, any severe trauma, "insult," or biochemical abnormality may affect it. As we all know, even transient emotional states can knock this delicately balanced block off the tower of learning abilities.

Attention systems grow in several directions in the brain: side to side, bottom to top, and inside to outside. Here's a brief summary of how they are formed.

Activating the Hemispheres

The side-to-side connections are mainly in the corpus callosum, that tough and busy band of fibers that carries messages between the hemispheres and lets the two sides of the cortex work efficiently together. Several prominent neuropsychologists believe that brains with attention and learning problems have trouble getting an idea into the appropriate hemisphere and keeping it there long enough to be processed efficiently.

One recent study measured electrical brain waves in right and left hemispheres of LD (in this case, reading disabled) children when they were doing different types of learning tasks; the measurements were then compared with brain-wave recordings from a group of good students doing the same activities. The good students showed the expected changes in hemispheric activation depending on whether the task was a verbal or nonverbal one, although overall they tended to favor left-hemisphere strategies. The LD children showed different patterns: (1) they had less overall left-hemisphere activation, even in verbal tasks, and (2) they showed significantly smaller shifts from one hemisphere to the other when the tasks required different processing strategies. [17]

If children have not had a chance to develop strong connections between the two sides or enough practice using left-hemisphere systems for careful listening, they certainly might have more trouble concentrating, getting their brains quickly and efficiently into gear for school tasks, and finding the best way to study and remember things they are supposed to learn. [18]

Three Levels of Attention

The up-and-down axis of brain maturation, which is probably the major route by which children learn to pay attention, may be particularly at risk in today's environments. Although, technically, this "attention circuit" cannot be separated from the hemispheres, since it crosses through them, it is, in many respects, a separate apparatus. Imagine, if you will, a circuit that runs from the base of your skull at the back of your head all the way up through the middle of the brain to the front of your forehead and back down again. This is similar to the main route from which higher-level systems receive information about where and how attention should be focused. These higher centers, in turn, decide what is to be done and then instruct the rest of the brain in how the behavior (including learning) is to be directed.

This attention loop has three layers that develop from bottom to top and inside to outside the brain. The first, primitive stage of the circuit lies near the top of the spinal cord, where it joins the skull, in brain structures that closely resemble those of other animals. It is responsible for basic alertness (e.g., staying awake when it is appropriate), screening out or letting in various types of stimuli (e.g., focusing without being distracted by background sights or sounds), filtering information, and getting the higher centers of the cortex "in gear."

Second come centers for emotion and memory, which are located in the middle of the brain in an area technically called the limbic system. In these "subcortical" areas, the incoming stimuli are connected with motivation (how important is it for me to pay attention to this right now?) and some centers for memory. I find it particularly interesting, although not intuitively surprising, that attention, emotion, motivation, and memory have such a close physical link in the nervous system.

Developmental influences on the limbic system are one of the great, barely unfolded mysteries of the brain. How do children acquire the neural foundations of motivation? No one really knows, but the central role of these midbrain connections imply that they must be important indeed.

At the very top of the circuit lie the frontal lobes of the cortex, comprising the frontmost parts of both right and left hemispheres. This part of the brain, which is the human animal's unique neural possession, is often called the executive of the brain because it is responsible for planning and regulating behavior. It consists of the motor cortex, which helps plan and implement physical movement, and the prefrontal areas, which, when (and if) fully developed, become the "boss" of thinking. (The terms "frontal" and "prefrontal" are used interchangeably.)

The neural groundwork for attention abilities is laid early in prenatal life, when the bottom layer of primitive "alerting" areas are developing. After birth the child must collaborate with nature and the motivational system to build the connections that put the thinking brain in charge. Because the higher centers can't take over immediately, young children are notoriously "stimulus-bound" -- at the mercy of any new sensory experience or idea. Thus they tend to be highly distractible.

During the years of childhood, especially between the ages of three and six, most youngsters work hard on learning to screen out both external and internal distractions and marshal their attention at will. Any environmental force that severely interferes with this important learning has the potential to disrupt the system. Sometime during adolescence, most brains are sufficiently mature to start to attend to future goals and use more complex forms of mental control (please notice, parents, I said "most"). It's a long process, indeed, and demands continued support from concerned and persistent (if often exasperated!) adults.

Attention and the Brain's Executive

Prefrontal development is not completed at least until late adolescence, or even adulthood. Thus, the way a child learns to use executive functions is doubtless highly dependent on the experiences the environment provides. Adults who show children how to put thought ahead of action, delay gratification, and use language as a tool for thinking and planning help provide the fundamental training ground for the brain's executive.

Curiously, this "highest" level of the brain's functioning does not seem to be measured by standard IQ tests. The rest of the cortex serves as the storehouse for taking in information, which it associates and connects into the intellectual data bank that constitutes a lifetime of learning. The frontal systems have a different responsibility: seeing that the data gets used effectively, the reason why they are referred to as the executive. When experts give advice about boosting mental skills, they are usually referring to the most efficient ways of filling up the storehouse. Unfortunately, they too often forget that merely trying to shovel in information will serve little purpose unless children also learn how to use their brains to stay mentally focused, put information into perspective, reflect on meaning, plan ahead, and follow through constructively -- the fundamental components of problem-solving. For this reason, "competency tests" that measure only the accumulation of data may seriously mislead us about children's real learning abilities. Without an efficient "executive," real-life competency is jeopardized.

Despite its critical importance in learning -- as well as in life -- there is little research on the way prefrontal development can be influenced. It appears that the way the brain learns to talk to itself may be a major factor in building its internal connections and learning to control the workings of both mind and body. [19] I will expand on this extremely important point in the next chapter.

For now, let us consider some of the interrelated factors that can cause trouble at any of the three levels of the attention system. Outright trauma, either before or after birth, is probably responsible only for a relatively small percentage of attention problems, but increasing numbers of children are currently seen as being at risk because of greater loads of environmental toxins and better survival rates for low-birthweight infants. Other more subtle factors, from "noise pollution" to biochemical effects of junk food, may tip the brain's attentional balances either before or after birth.

Several types of hazards in contemporary life should be specifically mentioned:

1. Toxic substances and foods that may predispose children to attention problems.

2. "Noisy" environments that cause children to tune out rather than tune in.

3. Sedentary lifestyles.

4. Failure by adults to act as constructive, thoughtful "coaches" for children.

HOW BRAINS GET "INSULTED": ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS FOR ATTENTION AND LEARNING

Before birth, some children suffer specific types of damage or so-called "insult" to attention-regulating systems. As we saw in Chapter 2, brains are at risk both before and soon after birth by overt damage from illness, accident, or exposure to toxins (e.g., lead, solvents, medications, etc.). Anything that deprives the brain of oxygen, particularly during times of rapid development, can also subtly jeopardize attention abilities. For example, children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, who were premature, or who suffered various types of birth trauma tend to have a higher rate of attention problems and related learning disabilities than other youngsters.

Even after the foundation systems are in place, the brain can be disrupted by anything that interferes with the proper workings of the limbic system or the higher centers in the cortex, particularly the frontal areas. Sometimes these effects are so subtle that no one connects the cause with the resulting learning problem. One reason is that the brain has built-in mechanisms to protect itself, which may work well until they become overtaxed.

A good example of a built-in protection system is the so-called blood-brain barrier, which screens out brain-damaging materials that may be circulating in the rest of the bloodstream. Some potentially injurious substances are able to sneak across this barrier, and it can also be weakened, or made more permeable, by environmental factors, such as prolonged exposure to toxins or an unbalanced or inadequate diet.

Once across the barrier, troublesome agents can affect brain functioning in at least two ways that are, as yet, only generally understood. First, they may be directly toxic and create overt, permanent damage, as in the impairments inflicted on the fetal brain by alcohol. More subtly, they may cause temporary changes in the fine chemical balance that makes thinking possible. Brains can be either intolerant or frankly allergic to certain substances, but it is difficult to pin down the culprits.

[admin]

PART 2 OF 2 (CHAPTER 8 CONT'D)

Alcohol and Drugs

Every prospective parent should by now be aware that alcohol use during pregnancy is clearly related to future learning problems, but it continues to be a significant issue. Exposure of growing brains to recreational drugs other than alcohol can also damage attention abilities. Yet, despite increased publicity about this problem, it seems to be getting larger. A recent article in the New York Times reported that "a frighteningly high number of babies -- possibly 375,000 a year -- are being exposed to cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, or other illegal drugs in the womb ... and face the possibility of health damage from their mothers' drug abuse." These findings, "not just an inner-city problem," span all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum and may significantly underestimate the extent of the problem, according to one expert quoted in the article. [20]

Toxic Environments

After birth, the growing brain remains highly susceptible. Lead is a particularly serious and ubiquitous threat to attention centers and can definitely lower children's IQs. Parents are well advised to screen their children's environments carefully for all possible sources, but educators are alarmed at recent reports that schools themselves may be physically hazardous in this respect. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, school officials began testing water fountains after a local newspaper reporter discovered unusually high lead levels in one school. Ultimately, they disconnected thirty-one water fountains and faucets after finding lead levels that were more than twenty times above the current EPA standard. [21] The national PTA has recently issued an appeal to schools to check lead levels of water and adopt appropriate safety measures. [22]

In Mexico City, where airborne pollution from car exhaust causes inhabitants to have drastically elevated blood lead levels, authorities shut down the school system for the entire month of January 1989, to reduce children's exposure to polluted air as they went to school and played outside during recess. Some foreign embassies in Mexico have even advised their diplomats to leave young children at home and not to have a baby while residing there. [23]

Other metals such as aluminum, arsenic, manganese, and mercury can also be neurotoxic, especially if they are combined with lead. Because scientists are now beginning to pay serious attention to this issue, we may hope that current vague warnings will soon yield to clearer guidelines.

Many potential sources of neurotoxic substances can be found in today's culture of chemical convenience. [24] Professor James Croxton of the University of Santa Cruz recently shared with me his concerns about widespread spraying of pesticides in areas near schools and homes. Pesticides may weaken or cross the blood-brain barrier, particularly in children who are not well nourished, he says. In another example, some school boards came under fire recently for the prevalent use of pesticides in school buildings. Parents who cite evidence of adverse effects in some children who are sensitive to chemicals have demanded more careful monitoring of the use of such strong substances around young children. Although there is no absolutely conclusive evidence about the relationship of pesticides to long-term difficulties in attention, a number of school districts are starting to reconsider and change their policies on spraying in classrooms. [25, 26] Since toxins may exacerbate each other's effects, any potential source of contamination should be a matter of serious concern. Intelligent societies do not poison -- in a very literal sense -- the minds of their young.

Junk Food and Jumpy Minds

Can fast food and soft drinks upset brain chemistry and thus be subtly poisonous to growing minds? In recent years a number of authorities have begun to investigate possible effects of dietary habits on brain function, but their disagreements are probably the prickliest in all of the research literature. While one responsible authority states with certainty that food does not cause attention or learning problems, in an adjoining room another insists that the diets of today's children -- particularly additives, sugar, and "overprocessed" fare -- play a major role.

As in most arguments, the truth appears to lie somewhere in between. Convincing evidence has been assembled to show that the chemistry of children's brains may be affected by what they eat or drink. Given the uniqueness of each individual's biochemical makeup, it is not surprising that offending substances may affect children quite differently. Moreover, since biochemical "insults" to the brain appear to be cumulative, some effects may not show up immediately or under some circumstances. For this reason, credible research findings have been hard to come by. I will summarize some of the newer findings.

The importance of a well-balanced diet is one of the few areas of professional agreement in this field. Such factors as iron deficiency and general malnutrition have negative effects on the brain and on learning abilities. The young brain is so plastic that the gross effects of severe early malnutrition can be reversed by changed environments, but authorities admit they cannot adequately assess more subtle forms of deprivation. Studies for many years have shown that children who eat breakfast or who are given nourishing snacks during school breaks show improved classroom performance. [27]

Increasing interest -- and more controversy -- has focused on effects of the modern diet, particularly excessive sugar or additives such as food dyes. Numerous studies have yielded a frustrating lack of firm conclusions; the best summary I can come up with is a rather unhelpful one: some things may be harmful for some children under some circumstances. [28] It does appear that several aspects of contemporary eating habits may be particularly dangerous. Children under three years of age may be most susceptible, but brains can be affected at any age. [29, 30] Many of our youngsters are routinely exposed to these suspected hazards:

• diets high in refined sugar
• no breakfast or high-carbohydrate breakfasts (sugars, starches)
• "empty" snacking calories replacing nutritious ones (e.g., too many overprocessed, snack, fast-type foods)
• soft drinks and other foods containing aspartame (NutraSweet)

In her book, Food Makes the Difference, Dr. Patricia Kane makes a strong case for the causal role of nutrition in children's learning and behavior problems. [31] Unsuspected food allergies are often at fault, she maintains, although they are frequently difficult to identify. An even bigger problem is that modern diets in general predispose children to difficulty by weakening the brain's natural defenses. "The surge of refined carbohydrates [sugar, starch] into children's diets is appalling," she says. Convenience and fast foods and sugared cereal are only symptomatic of our neglect of basic nutritional priorities.

Carbohydrates may impair intellectual performance differently in different children, suggests MIT biochemist Dr. Judith Wurtman, because in large doses they may act more like drugs than like food. Depending on the biochemistry of the individual child, heavy doses of carbohydrates may cause a "sugar buzz"; more often, however, the aftermath is lethargy.

"A child who comes home, has potato chips and Coke in the afternoon, pizza with little or no cheese on it for dinner, and ice cream for dessert, has been priming himself with carbohydrates for several hours," Wurtman says. "When it comes time to do homework, that child will [have difficulty] because of sleepiness or lethargy." A little protein might make a big difference. [32]

One of the leading authorities in the field, Dr. Keith Conners, author of Feeding the Brain, has been particularly interested in the effects of sugar on learning. [33] In conducting extensive experiments with both "normal" and, "hyperactive" children, he discovered that high-protein breakfasts (two eggs, in these experiments) could counteract sugar's negative effects and possibly even improve learning and memory in the brain's chemical transmission system. On the other hand, no breakfast or a high-carbohydrate one (two pieces of toast in this case) was a recipe for trouble in some children. (As a longtime parent, I should have asked Dr. Conners how he got the children to eat the two eggs, but I didn't.)

"Kids really ought to eat breakfast because there's a measurable decline in efficiency in all kids, not just hyperactive kids, when they don't," he concludes. "That breakfast probably ought to contain at least a minimum amount of protein." It's all right to eat cereal if it has milk on it, he explains, but children who only have dry cereal or things like doughnuts or potato chips may have trouble sustaining concentration through the morning. Stress makes the brain even more susceptible. "We may need to consider selective protein supplementation for kids under a lot of stress," he suggests. [34]

Dr. Conners also emphasizes that balanced nutrition can help the brain screen out undesirable substances, even toxins such as lead. Anemic, iron-deficient children, or those without other essential nutrients such as zinc, have brains more vulnerable to toxic assault. Vitamin pills probably aren't the answer, however, since combinations of essential nutrients may be less effectively taken up and used by the body than those in real food.

Dr. Conners is also concerned about a much less discussed but perhaps even more alarming trend. Along with many others, he deplores the growing use of aspartame by children despite warnings from physicians that extended usage may have unknown and potentially dangerous neurological consequences.

Aspartame, marketed under the trade name NutraSweet, and consumed by at least 100 million Americans in the form of soft drinks and other artificially sweetened foods (including some innocent-looking vitamin pills), is broken down by the body into compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier. They have a proven potential to disrupt brain chemistry in some people. Small children may be particularly susceptible. One of these compounds is the same as the one that causes mental retardation in untreated victims of the inherited condition called PKU, for which all newborns are now routinely screened.

According to Dr. Richard Wurtman of MIT, the foremost researcher on aspartame's effects on the brain, some individuals may be genetically more susceptible than others. But the effects of consumption -- which range from headaches and impaired learning performance all the way up to seizures -- may show up only after prolonged use of the sweetener. The user, therefore, may not suspect the source of the problem. Researchers believe females are affected more often than males. Figure 4 presents a list of documented neurological effects of aspartame.

Dr. Wurtman convened a recent conference at which over one hundred scientists from all over the United States and Europe presented findings that should certainly make parents think twice about allowing their children access to this substance. A predominant opinion expressed by these experts was, manufacturers' reassurances notwithstanding, research to date is surprisingly "inadequate." [35]

"Some young kids do react very adversely to this artificial sweetener," says Keith Conners. "This is a real big concern since it is so widely spread out now in our food supply."

Having followed these reports, I find myself appalled that pregnant women and many young children, even toddlers, consume this controversial intrusion into the American diet. I also wonder, given the finding that depression may be one symptom resulting from use of aspartame, whether increased consumption has any bearing on some recent reports of increased incidence of depression in teenagers. It is easy to become impatient with a society that prates about the importance of mental ability and simultaneously feeds its children such substances.

The Brain of a Couch Potato

Unfortunately, "diet" soft drinks are partially a response to the fact that we seem to be raising a generation of sedentary, physically unfit children. A number of studies have shown that an alarming number of American kids are overweight and can't pass basic physical tests of strength, endurance, and agility. In 1984, only 2% of the 18 million children who took the Presidential Fitness Test received an award. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a report declaring that up to 50% of the nation's schoolchildren are not getting enough exercise to develop healthy hearts and lungs, and 40% of youngsters between ages five and eight exhibit at least one risk factor for heart disease. [36]



FIGURE 4. Symptoms Reported by 405 Persons Susceptible to Aspartame

As clear evidence of lifestyle changes in the last two decades, rates of obesity among children and adolescents jumped 45% between 1960 and the early 1980s. The United States Army was forced in 1989 to modify the physical requirements in basic training because so many enlistees were getting injured.

"It's our opinion that the young people coming into the military now have spent more time in front of the TV than on the tennis court or a softball field," commented Lt. Col. John Anderson, who says he can't remember recruits in worse condition in his twenty-year career. [37]

George Allen, chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, expresses serious concern about our children's condition compared to that of their counterparts in other countries. On a recent trip to the Soviet Union, he says, "I was amazed at how far ahead the Soviet youngsters are in fitness compared to American youth .... You don't find many of them watching television until midnight and eating junk food." [38]

If young bodies are in bad shape, what about the brains attached to them? Surprisingly, we know little about what poor levels of fitness imply for neural functioning. A moderate relationship has been shown between motor performance and school success, and exercise can improve both motivation and subsequent abilities to concentrate. [39] Yet no one has thoroughly explored the real effects of sedentary lifestyles on learning abilities. How many attention problems could be related to the fact that so many children nowadays have their natural energies bottled up in schedules and expectation -- and few physical outlets? One survey of physical education classes even showed students getting only about ten minutes of active exercise because so much time was taken up by changing clothes and listening to the teacher talk. A mother of a third grader who just started taking Ritalin because he "can't concentrate" told me that her child comes home from a seven-hour "work" day (i.e., school), "has a snack, and must then sit down and do homework until dinnertime so that he won't have to miss his favorite evening TV programs. "Does he have any time for free play?" I asked. "Well, not really" -- she paused -- "but he has his soccer practice on weekends and a swimming lesson once a week."

Small-muscle activity is also important for school success. One recent study of children aged five to thirteen surprised researchers by showing that "sensorimotor-perceptual skills" (e.g., solving pencil-and-paper mazes, putting pegs in holes quickly and efficiently, copying geometric shapes) were as closely related to academic achievement for the older children as they were for the younger. [40]

"Thought is constructed, not only out of perceiving objects, but also out of physical activities with them." [41] When a child plays and exercises large muscles or pursues games and hobbies that build fine-motor skills (e.g., constructing models, carpentry, sewing, playing jacks), he or she is strengthening motor synapses that are next-door neighbors to the neurons that manage mental behaviors -- including attention. Some children with clearly organic learning problems are motorically clumsy; this may relate to a generalized difficulty organizing and managing what comes into and goes out of their brains (in this case messages to and from the muscles). It seems only reasonable to assume that learning to manage muscles teaches a child feelings of control. Whether or not specific neural connections for attention and more abstract types of learning are also being forged is an interesting research question.

A program of physical exercises, called Sensory Integration Therapy, was developed by California physical therapist Dr. Jean Ayres because of her conviction that movement is the foundation of many types of learning. [42, 43] Many physical therapists and some teachers who work with children with learning disabilities have become convinced of the value of these techniques. Definitive proof has been hard to come by, but even professionals who are skeptical of claims about "sensory integration" are aware of the need to study the relationship of children's movement and learning.

Dr. Phyllis Weikart, associate professor in the Division of Physical Education at the University of Michigan and author of Round the Circle: Key Experiences in Movement, fears that lack of play and body movement is jeopardizing young children's potential learning abilities. [44] She thinks adults are too busy trying to sit children down and force learning, rather than letting them play naturally to build the motor-control centers of their brains.

"All this conversation is going on about cognitive development, but we've forgotten the child's body," she says. "The amount of physical activity since the turn of the century has declined seventy-five percent; children are not playing, and through play a great deal of active learning takes place. Children used to play in natural ways, with kids of different ages, outside, basically unsupervised by adults. Visual and auditory attention, body coordination -- all were gained through that kind of play. This physical learning must take place before children start dealing with abstractions; it doesn't happen if children don't have those experiences."

Changing lifestyles may also be squelching the independent experiences by which children learn to manage their own brains, according to this expert on motor development. "We're providing care so the parents can work. We're creating homogeneity of age groups so children aren't learning in natural cross-age situations. There are so many issues that crop up for people who are caring for children; they have to keep the lid on so the child won't get hurt and they'll get sued. These issues didn't exist before, but they're not going to go away. Parents are going to work and these children have to be cared for, but we've got to be careful we don't negate all the naturalness that kids need in play."

Dr. Weikart has recently become fascinated by the question of how physical movement helps children develop an internal sense of "beat" that seems to correlate with reading and math abilities. She acknowledges she cannot yet explain, in terms of the brain, what "beat" has to do with academic learning, but when we were talking, I remembered that several elementary physical-education teachers had shared with me their puzzlement about why so many more children today seem to be lacking this basic sense of internal rhythm. Dr. Weikart suggests that the reason may be they have not gotten in touch with the internal beat of their own bodies.

"It's frightening! They need beat, but rock music doesn't give them that because it's heard, they don't create it out of their own bodies," she insists. "Feeling has to be independent for the child; you can't make it loud and you can't make it visual as in the videos; it has to be felt. Unless the child is rocked, patted, stroked, danced with at the same time; unless adults are creating the feel of the beat for the child who is hearing it, that feel of beat does not develop."

If children are exposed to too much strong, external beat, they may become "disoriented" and develop attention problems because they are having difficulty reconciling their own inner beat with the outside stimulus, suggests Dr. Weikart. ''That constant verbal, visual bombardment, all it's doing is tuning children out. If we want to improve their attention, we've got to get them up, get them physically involved, tune them back in." [45]

Noisy Brains

Nowadays when the parents bring these kids in the morning, we have to spend at least a half hour either waking them up or calming them down. They come from houses where the TV is going all the time, ride in cars with the music blaring -- it' s no wonder some have blocked it out and others are bouncing off walls. We used to be able to start our activities as soon as the children arrived, but now we always begin with a nice long transition period to get them tuned in. -- Nursery school teacher, Texas

Could stereo headphones change children's brains? Obviously there's the potential for that. One could argue one of two things: either that it will make them more auditorily responsive or that it's going to produce some kind of weird dissociation between modalities [hearing and seeing] because they're chronically dissociated by the use of those things. -- Dr. William T. Greenough

What does noise bombardment do to children's brains? How much may it account for kids who can't pay attention, listen to "talk," and tune in appropriately to learning? One line of research has centered on the irreplaceable structures in the ear that are especially vulnerable during early years. It has been proven that they can be damaged by certain loud noises, including music.

Another group of studies has shown that environments not considered particularly noisy by adults may interfere permanently with the development of language, listening, and even reading abilities. [46]

Other interesting avenues of speculation are also being discussed behind the closed doors of neuropsychological conferences. Three of these involve the effects of a preponderance of musical stimulation on the development of the hemispheres and the connections between them, some additional ideas about what heavy doses of "beat" might do to growing brains, and the effects of an overload of sensory input on a nervous system that has not yet developed effective mechanisms to defend itself.

Brain studies have repeatedly shown that music, for everyone but highly trained musicians, is processed predominantly in the right hemisphere -- in areas directly opposite those responsible for most language processing. Most of us listen and respond primarily in a holistic, "feeling" way to melody (right hemisphere's specialty), while musicians are trained to listen analytically to the technical sequence of notes and other features that must be handled by the left hemisphere. [47, 48] The relaxed state often induced by music is reflected in changes in brain-wave patterns: the more vigorous beta waves that characterize active mental processing yield to slower alpha waves, which are more commonly associated with relaxation. When parts of the brain are "in alpha," they are essentially switched off from active thinking or learning.

Why do some teenagers insist they can concentrate better on their homework with a background of music? We might speculate that music as background generates enough alpha in the right hemisphere to enable left hemisphere language areas to lead the attack on academic work. No one really understands all the ramifications of hemispheric byplay. Moreover, what works for one brain may be annoying or distracting for another. When music stops being background and becomes foreground, concentration probably suffers.

Increasing questions are being raised as to whether too much loud music might induce in a growing brain not real relaxation, but instead a habit of defensively "tuning out" to active thought ("going into alpha"). A related question is whether large quantities of uncritical listening may rob left-hemisphere language systems of the developmental time and space they need for fine-tuning. Certainly, the lyrics of much contemporary music are definitely not designed as linguistic models. "For every song that stands or falls by its words, there must be a hundred that thrive in spite of them ... and sound often has the edge over sense," commented Jon Pareles, acerbic New York Times music critic. [49] Like other serious musicians, he expresses concern over declining interest by listeners in responding to more complex, analytic forms of the art. Much popular music, he says, "eliminates the most complex, time-consuming, mentally draining part of the musical experience -- paying attention." [50]

No one would recommend depriving adults of badly needed relaxation and harmless -- for them -- pleasures. Yet there are many adult pleasures that are handled successfully only by the mature brain. For children, challenge is the stimulus for the hemispheres to get their act together by strengthening the physical connections between them. Anything that either forces or induces the brain into a non-learning state for extended periods of time could certainly interfere with this process.

Young brains are particularly sensitive because they haven't yet developed automatic screening devices. The normal human brain has built-in mechanisms for moderating incoming sensory stimulation to levels that keep it sufficiently "aroused" without becoming overwhelmed. Children's brains, however, have not had time to refine these filtering systems; when overwhelmed, they either "tune out" or their behavior becomes unmanageable. Even normal adults exposed long enough to abnormally high or low levels of sensory stimulation may start to act like hyperactive children! [51] We all learn to screen out a great deal of background noise (e. g., canned music in stores, offices, etc.), but at some point the unconscious effort involved takes its toll and we become habitually stressed out without understanding why. For youngsters, it is even harder to sort out such effects.

Dr. Susan Luddington-Hoe, the authority on infant stimulation, points out that even before birth tender young brains show a distinctly negative response to certain kinds of noise. She cites one example of a professional pianist who, when pregnant, found she could no longer play Chopin because her infant started to thrash around so violently. This fetus, however, seemed to love Mozart. "The fetal heartbeat changes significantly to different types of music," says Dr. Luddington-Hoe. "Both before and after birth, babies are really bothered by strong beat and loud music -- but they love soft music and are especially thrilled by Vivaldi." In another case, a fetus who was taken to a rock concert kicked so hard, apparently in consternation, that he broke one of his mother's ribs. [52]

"My guess is the biggest problem with learning-disabled children is that their sensory thresholds are so low because they've had such a history of bombardment," says Dr. Luddington-Hoe. "Their brains are letting in too much input because they're overwhelmed."

Hooked on Alpha?

When considering children whose attention problems seem to relate more to underactivity, some professionals wonder whether these children are learning to swaddle their brains in sensation-dulling music as an escape from excesses of stimulation in everyday life. Is it possible to be neurologically addicted to alpha rhythm? Certainly, headsets do seem to be on their way to replacing books and magazines for the young.

When I shared some of these questions with Dr. Jerre Levy, an expert on hemispheric development who teaches at the University of Chicago, she admitted she had been wondering about this issue herself. "It's the nature of the music they're listening to, this popular music," she said. It is different from other kinds of music in that the tempo is exactly like a metronome: beat, beat, beat. Studies have shown that flashing lights at a fixed frequency (flash, flash, flash) sets up a rhythm in the brain that interferes with normal processing. The same may be true of the auditory system, she suggests.

When a person is simply sitting doing nothing, Dr. Levy went on, brain waves are regularly synchronized: boom, boom, boom. (This is the case in relaxed states such as alpha.) If the person is given a mental problem to solve, the brain's rhythm becomes "desynchronized" because the rhythm is broken by being forced to think.

"Now, if in your waking hours you have something coming in that's going beat, beat, beat," she explained, "my own feeling is that you're going to make kids space out because it's putting the brain into a loop; if it's in the loop, it can't desynchronize and therefore it can't think. You're really blocking the capacity for thinking." [53]

Scientists have become sufficiently concerned to initiate animal studies of other kinds of rhythmic variables. Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University reared mice either in a quiet environment, one with soft classical background music, or one with equally soft but arrhythmic drumbeats. The first two groups developed normally, but the latter animals showed difficulty navigating a standard maze, hyperactive and vicious behavior, as well as significant abnormalities in growth of brain cells in centers for learning and memory. Thus, it appears that continual exposure to other kinds of rhythms may also irritate the brain, irrespective of volume. [54]

In summary, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the brain needs time and quiet space in which to develop the ability to manage itself. To gain enough inner control to enjoy the quality of its own mental life, a child's mind should be furnished with some pieces of quiet thought, not the tacky trappings of constant noise.

[admin]

CHAPTER 9: The Starving Executive

It's the lifestyles. Kids have to learn to pay attention. But as far as adults sitting down and doing tasks with a child, I don't think our lifestyles encourage that. -- NURSERY SCHOOL TEACHER, SMALL TOWN, TENNESSEE

The growing brain, because it is so plastic, is a remarkably resilient mechanism that can probably withstand a number of adverse factors before it becomes overwhelmed. All the potential hazards in the world may not account for the majority of the attention problems now facing the schools. At least equally important, many experts believe, is the way adults teach children habits of organization, reflection, and internal control. These are important, not only for children at risk for a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, but also for every child who will be expected to pay sufficient attention to learn effectively.

According to a theory proposed by Dr. Michael Posner and Dr. Frances Friedrich in a recent book on the brain and education, [1] it is possible that training of attention in one type of learning -- such as how to do tasks at home -- might make it easier for a child to learn to use similar approaches in other situations -- such as school.

Dr. Martha Bridge Denckla, a pediatric neurologist, director of the Kennedy Institute Neurobehavioral Clinic, and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, sees hundreds of children with learning disabilities and attention problems each year. She says she is beginning to wonder just how much of this growing phenomenon of inattention might be attributable to a lack of basic organization in children's lives.

"I think clearly organic problems may account for about one-third of the cases," she told me, "but I'm beginning to think many of the others relate to changing environments for young children. I see an awful lot of parents with a lack of knowledge about child development who don't have the ability to provide the structure children need. I had a couple in the other day who thought their three-year-old was hyperactive, and when I asked them about their daily routines, I found out they expected, among other things, this three-year-old to take her own bath. There was no one to say to the child, 'Now we get up, now we get dressed.' There are families nowadays that never have a family meal; they literally leave food out on the counters. These are people living in $300,000 homes and both working in law offices."

Definite changes have occurred in the last five years. Dr. Denckla continued. ''I'm worried about the parents who think they can just purchase goods and commodities without doing anything for the child. Simple things -- mealtimes, bedtimes, who lays out your clothes. It would be like language deprivation -- if you don't have organized 'tutoring' at home, you don't know what it feels like to have a rhythm to your day. Some parents' relationship with their children is almost all recreational. They view their child as someone to have fun with; they're the entertainment committee and the rest is up to the school or the day care. But I wonder if you can learn these general habits of self-regulation in day care. There will always be some survivors -- some children will always survive -- but how many are going to be in trouble?"

Could there be critical or sensitive periods for learning attention, just as there are for different aspects of language?

"No one knows," replied Dr. Denckla. 'The whole developmental curve is a very long story. The steepest part of the curve is probably between ages three and six. The question not answered is whether at the very earliest part it needs one-on-one. Then, later, in a group, the underpinnings are already set." [2]

HOMES ARE IMPORTANT

Whether we want to admit it or not, the way parents and/or caregivers interact with children is critically important in teaching them how to pay attention. These interactions also communicate subtle messages about what is appropriate to pay attention to, the thing most children diagnosed as ADHD don't seem to understand. [3]

Although up to 40% of children show some specific symptoms that look like attention deficit during the preschool years, [4] many overcome these difficulties as a result not only of maturation but of the way they are handled at home. Studies demonstrate: (1) for all but the most severely hyperactive or attention-disordered children, home environment variables are better predictors of educational outcomes and even later substance abuse and conduct problems (i.e., delinquency) than are innate biological factors; [5] (2) well-ordered, organized environments can compensate to a surprising extent even for the type of risk factors described in the last chapter; and (3) training of adult caregivers to teach children techniques of controlling behavior is at least as effective as and may be superior to the use of Ritalin. [6-8] Even when Ritalin is prescribed, its effects tend to be short-lived unless this kind of "behavioral" or "cognitive" therapy is included in the prescription. [9, 10] These facts hold true at all levels of the socioeconomic scale, although the economically disadvantaged are more at risk for attention and conduct problems because of more disrupted home lives, fewer role models, less adequate health care, and a greater incidence of prematurity. [11]

The Magic Formula -- Talk

In addition to helping a child with basic organization of daily routines, adults must be involved in showing children how to ask the right questions, talk through problems, plan ahead, and generally insert language (and some associated thought) between impulse and behavior. [12] In other words, adults must talk with children. Let me illustrate this point with an example. Traveling by plane, I was recently seated next to a mother with a four-year-old son and an infant daughter going from the East Coast to a western city that was to be their new home. The boy, an obviously bright and wiggly handful, had scarcely touched the seat before he began to spew forth questions. Despite her need to keep the baby under control, this mother patiently tried to answer each in terms the child could understand. I was struck with the advanced quality of both his language expression and his understanding -- as well as the degree of maternal patience. Soon after we took off, the inevitable occurred.

"Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom!"

Long pause. "Are you really sure?"

"No, I really don't."

"Well, if you must go, I will take you, but I'll have to do something with the baby."

"We can leave the baby with this lady," he suggested, gesturing all too willingly at me.

"No, we can't," replied Mom with a wink in my direction.

"Why?"

"Because we don't leave babies with other people."

Momentarily satisfied, the child decided his needs were taking a different course.

''I'm thirsty!"

"The flight attendant will come around soon with a tray of drinks. Let's plan now what you would like to drink when he gets here."

After actively debating the relative merits of soft drinks and juice, he decided, "Orange juice. Why are you putting the table down?"

"So you'll have a place to put your drink when it comes. Now you're all ready."

''I'm going to ask him if he's going to serve lunch on this flight." This child was learning how to get mentally as well as physically prepared.

Eventually, the conversation turned to their new home. "Mom, show me again where we're going." Mom took a map from the seat pocket and juggling infant and bottle, pointed out their former home and their destination.

"And my dad's right there," said the boy, tapping the map triumphantly.

"Yes, and tomorrow at three o'clock we're going to go to your new school and meet your new teacher. That will be fun because you'll get to meet lots of new children."

He mulled this over for a moment, and a shadow crossed his face.

"Mommy'" he lamented. "I can't read!"

Mom smiled. "You're not supposed to be able to read -- you're only four years old."

This seemingly unremarkable interchange struck me as important for several reasons. First, it seemed evident that the child's advanced language development stemmed, at least in part, from the time that his mother and other adults (she told me later she is a full-time student) have spent in conversation with him. Secondly, although he is obviously cut out of vigorous and distractible material, his energies have been directed into mental exploration of ideas rather than impulsive physical action. Third, his mother is teaching him the habit of using language to plan ahead and get prepared for things that will happen instead of responding impulsively. In this way, she is helping him get control over his own brain, his behavior -- and his world. I am willing to bet this child will do well in school, not just because he is bright, but because his environment is preparing him for the kinds of sustained mental involvement and control that are so integral to learning.

I have also observed, less happily, other types of interaction: adults who abdicate the job of showing children what this type of thoughtful reasoning looks and sounds like, others who slap or jerk around children, responding impulsively to the exigencies of the moment themselves rather than taking the time to think and talk through a problem.

Even well-intentioned, loving parents sometimes teach children to respond in ways that don't build the type of attention- and problem-solving skills they will need for academic learning. On another flight not long after the one described above, I was dealt a father and his adorable two-year-old daughter, who were flying from Chicago to Los Angeles. This dad, clearly devoted to his little girl, got another prize for patience as he tried to amuse her with no toys or books and just a few snacks. She soon spied the instruction card and in-flight magazine in the seat pocket and started playing with them, putting the card in and out of the pocket, on her head, behind his back, etc. Dad cooperated, smiling, in the game, but there was no conversation. Any time she wanted something, she would point or pull on his hand to attract his attention.

Eventually the game with the card became a bit too vigorous, so he opened the magazine in front of her, turning the pages as they regarded the pictures together. Again, almost no words were exchanged. The youngster would spy a picture and pound excitedly on it with her fingers; Dad would grunt an assent and then move on to another picture. Occasionally, he provided a simple label such as "flower" or "elephant." Once, at a picture of a tiger, the child held up her hands, pantomiming fear. "Ooooooo -- " she said, and Dad replied, "Ummmmmm."

Overall, it was clear, although this child was able to speak, she was being encouraged to respond more to color and interesting shapes than she was to the content of the pictures. Moreover, the "game" here soon began to focus on who could turn the page faster -- and the action began to get out of hand, with the magazine now assuming the function of a manipulative toy. As the child got increasingly excited, father replaced the magazine in the seat pocket and without a word, offered her a packet of pretzels as distraction and struck up a conversation with me.

I feel guilty being critical of this devoted parent, and we certainly can't compare the verbal development of a two-year-old with that of a child two years older. Nevertheless, I was struck by the different styles these two parents were modeling. The first mother was showing her son how to think and plan ahead -- to act rather than react. She was teaching him not only to express his needs, ask questions, understand and organize his world, but also to think and reason about situations far from the one at hand (the "decontextualized" thinking mentioned earlier as being so important in school). The father was encouraging his little girl, at a critical age for language foundations, to respond impulsively and almost exclusively to the physical, visual, and emotional aspects of each situation. A related message was that the text of reading material is secondary to the pictures.

Studies that we will explore fully in a later chapter have shown that children from homes that encourage these two different patterns tend to achieve -- and to pay attention -- very differently when they get to school. It is not a matter of intelligence, but rather a question of learning to use the planning functions of language to mediate personal thought and problem-solving.

Conversation Builds the Executive Brain

It is not intuitively surprising to learn that teaching children to talk through problems helps them with higher-level learning and mental organization -- as well as with managing their behavior. It is more surprising to discover, in the writings of Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, that conversing with one's own mind may have brain-altering physical effects. Luria believed, and many modern-day theorists agree, that using language can strengthen the brain's executive functions, with a shorthand system of communicating with oneself as the final and most critical stage of the process.

The term "inner speech" refers to this shorthand, an internal dialogue used, for example, to help us remember something ("Now, let's see, I was going to buy hamburger buns and mustard and something else for the picnic"), to plan ahead ("Since I'm going to meet him at noon, I'll have to leave home at eleven-thirty"), or to work out the steps in solving a problem ("If I start by trying . . . , then this might happen ... and then I'd have to ... ). As adults we don't say all these words to ourselves, we somehow think them almost instantaneously.

According to Luria, this ability develops slowly as a child's overall capacity to use language shapes growing powers of reasoning. He believed that both external and internal language partially account for the fact that the human species sports brains more complex and specialized than those of animals, mainly in the area of the executive prefrontal cortex. Language, he maintained, is a process that is "characteristic of the development of almost all the higher forms of mental activity" and can physically "reorganize the cortical zones that underlie higher mental processes." [13]

Luria drew many of his ideas about the way children learn to reason from the work of another Russian, Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky's work is currently being rediscovered in Europe, Israel, and America and applied both by developmental psychologists and by therapists working with attention-disordered children. In an influential book entitled Thought and Language, Vygotsky described both the way in which inner speech develops and how interaction with adults helps children learn to use it to organize their mental processes. [14]

SPEECH THAT TURNS INTO THOUGHT

According to Vygotsky, inner speech develops as the child learns to use language, first to think out loud and then to reason inside his own mind. Eventually, it becomes an instinctive tool with which to think and also to communicate thoughts by speech and writing. I am convinced that a major reason so many students today have difficulty with problem solving, abstract reasoning, and writing coherently is that they have insufficiently developed mechanisms of inner speech. First of all, their brains may have been bombarded with too much noise and overprogramming (literally and figuratively!). How could they tune in to an inner voice if they are never allowed to experience quiet? Secondly, some adults are copping out on showing children how to use this tool for thinking. Third, schools that keep young children from talking much of the time -- even to themselves -- do not help the situation.

Inner speech starts with social experience in the earliest interactions of the infant and the caregiver. Children gradually absorb the methods that caregivers use to regulate them and then begin to use the same methods on themselves. Impulsive physical punishment or careless unconcern may cause the child to try to manage his world in the same manner. He may also adopt a similarly impulsive or diffident mental style -- jumping at problems, striking out at them and then withdrawing, or else simply avoiding them. On the other hand, if adults show children that they themselves carefully evaluate, think, and talk through problems, the child receives a very different set of messages about the way the world -- both physical and mental -- should be approached.

Most parents talk to their infants. When they first begin, perhaps even before birth, speech has little if any meaning for the child. Soon, however, he or she begins to respond and gradually, as words spoken by adults begin to make sense, starts to use words on herself. A toddler may give himself or herself commands out loud, as when a two-year-old says "Susan, no!" when she knows she shouldn't touch something. At this point the system is still far from being internalized, so she may go ahead and touch it anyway! (Notably, adult patients who have suffered damage to frontal brain areas often behave in much the same way.) For the child, this step is an important one, which Vygotsky called "egocentric speech." "It does not merely accompany the child's activity . . . it is intimately and usefully connected with the child's thinking." [15]

Egocentric speech gradually starts to be absorbed. As prefrontal cortex matures, the regulatory "talk" goes underground between the ages of three and seven and becomes transformed into the ability to "think words" and use them to manage behavior. The ages of two to five years seem to be particularly important for this step, [16] and by the time a child is of elementary school age, the ability to reason within one's own brain should be off to a good start. It is probably no coincidence that this timetable appears to correspond with preliminary development of the executive control centers in the prefrontal cortex.

Examples from studies investigating the development of inner speech show how children learn it. Toddlers, when given a pegboard and instructed to hit a single peg, followed the directions better when they were shown how to say "one" at the same time they hit the peg. It was necessary for these little ones to say the word out loud. By upper-elementary school age, children should be able to use a silent cue with equal effectiveness.

School-aged children also tend to be more aware of the meaning of the words they use. In one ingenious series of studies, children aged three to seven were placed in a room containing highly attractive items such as food or toys. They were told that the longer they refrained from touching the tempting objects, the greater the prize they would earn. The experimenter then left the room while a hidden camera and a mike recorded the children's reactions. Children who mumbled or talked to themselves (e.g., "I won't touch, I won't touch") were more successful at waiting than those who didn't use language to help themselves. Then the experimenters tried teaching the children to use different types of verbal cues, either relevant (e.g., "I must not turn around and look at the toys") or irrelevant (e.g., "Hickory dickory dock"). Younger children were helped somewhat by being taught to say any words at all, whether they related to the situation or not, but older ones were more successful with instructions that had appropriate meaning. Experiments like these have shown that there is a definite developmental progression in the use of inner speech, and a "trend from externalized to internalized control." [17]

These forms of verbal self-regulation, as they are called, also help children with learning tasks. Children who use inner speech effectively can remember information and events better. They are better at problem-solving because they can "talk through" steps, evaluate alternatives, and speculate about possible outcomes. They can organize and apply information more effectively and develop better strategies when taking notes in class, studying for exams, and even understanding and remembering what they read.

Is it a complicated job to teach children verbal self-regulation? No, but it takes a long time and a lot of attention. When adults make the effort to sit down and work with a child, they not only automatically arouse the child's motivation, but they also tend instinctively to ask questions to clarify where the child's thinking "is coming from." Educational psychologist Eleanor Duckworth believes these natural interactions give children tools to refine their own inner dialogue. She says:

To the extent that one carries on a conversation with a child as a way of trying to understand a child's understanding, the child's understanding increases "in the very process." The questions the interlocutor asks in an attempt to clarify for him/herself what the child is thinking oblige the child to think a little further also .... What do you mean? How did you do that? Why do you say that? How does that fit with what was just said? I don't really get that; could you explain it another way? Could you give me an example? How did you figure that? [18]

In today's parlance, Vygotsky's theory suggests that adults must act as coaches to show children how to internalize speech. As they do so, they also teach strategies for thinking. Parents instinctively model and help their children practice physical skills or speech patterns that are just one step above their current level of development; in similar ways they help them talk and think their way through problems. The adult, working with the child, structures the situation so that the child can reason at a level that would be impossible if he were left on his own.

When I reflect on this important view of adult roles in the learning process, I like to picture the child as perched somewhere on a long developmental ladder. Underneath are all the stages of mental development already mastered, far above are those yet unreachable. But directly above the child there is a lovely, ripe area that is attainable -- but only with a leg up from adults who will provide physical and mental cues and clues. Vygotsky called this ripe area the zone of proximal development, now often referred to as the ZPD.

PROBLEM SOLVING, LIFESTYLES, AND THE ZPD

This type of adult support acts as a scaffold which surrounds children with competence as they move into new types of learning. Courtney Cazden describes a familiar scene in illustration of a basic physical type of scaffolding for a child who is just learning to walk:

Imagine a picture of an adult holding the hand of a very young child. . . . The child does what he or she can and the adult does the rest; the child's practice occurs in the context of the full performance; and the adult's help is gradually withdrawn (from holding two hands to just one, then to offering only a finger, and then withdrawing that a few inches, and so on) as the child's competence grows. [19]

Intellectual reasoning and problem-solving are similarly guided. One of the adult's most important and difficult jobs, of course, is gradually to withdraw the supports until the child can succeed independently. Rather than fostering dependence, good scaffolding encourages independence. Caretakers who are overly anxious about their responsibility for a child, who end up doing everything for him and "picking up the pieces" of the problems he should clean up himself, are setting him up for later learning difficulties.

When a child learns along with an adult, special sorts of motivation and mastery infuse the experience. They mutually share the responsibility for the outcome; the child does what he can, and the adult fills in the gaps. Thus the child learns:

• how to do the task in question
• what it feels like to be successful at doing it
• the importance of persistence
• what it means to take personal responsibility for the outcome

These particular experiences are ones in which learning disabled and ADHD children tend to be deficient. The alarming news is that increasing numbers of "normal" children also seem to lack them. Poor learners are poor problem solvers; they have difficulty taking internal responsibility and coming up with effective strategies to cope with new or difficult types of learning. In classrooms now, the term "learned helplessness" is increasingly heard as a description of typical forms of behavior. One major theory even argues that "learned helplessness" and weakness in problem-solving strategies may be fundamental causes of learning disability.

Many children today spend a great deal of time in situations where competent adults are not available or involved in providing suitable scaffolding for inner speech and other problem-solving skills. These abilities are best learned in natural contexts, with real problems that have meaning to both adult and child -- such as helping in the kitchen, the workshop, the garden, the store, or other forms of mutual activity. Watching television does not suffice, since it is not an interactive experience and tends to suppress any tendency to talk through problems or ask questions about why things are happening. It also tends to focus on "magical" solutions and visual effects that defy true logic.

One elementary school head in an affluent Midwestern suburb recently told me that children from "normal" households are now showing the types of language and impulse-control problems she used to see only in children who came from a home where a parent was disturbed, depressed, or alcoholic.

"It's as if no one had taken the time to talk to these children, help them think through a process step by step. People used to say things like, 'Now we're going to clean the living room; what are we going to need? Let's see, we'll need a dustrag and the vacuum, etc. You go get the dustrag. Oh, I'd better put vacuum bags on the shopping list.'

"Simple things like that, so the child gets to make connections, classify, follow directions, learn to think ahead. Now our children don't so often help with the housework, the grocery shopping. The caregiver may be different from the housekeeper, and so the child isn't exposed to these kinds of experiences. Even when the parent does the chores, after they've been working all day they're tired, and it's easier to do it themselves.

''I'm worried," she added as I prepared to leave her office. "These parents are highly achieving people because of the input they received from their parents. They expect their children to be high achievers, too, but they're cheating them out of the same experiences."

A Generation of "Weak Reasoners"

Older students now in schools also have difficulty developing strategies to solve problems and sticking to the task until success is achieved. The startling national decline in reading comprehension, mathematics reasoning, and science ability in the United States has been attributed by many educators to a growing prevalence of this type of "weak reasoning" -- and not just among the learning disabled. As an example, "dismal" was the term applied to student proficiency in mathematics by the National Assessment of Educational Progress on the basis of testing done in 1986. Although the amount of math homework and testing in schools has increased "dramatically" over the last few years, what little progress has occurred has come in lower-order skills (routine adding, multiplying, etc.). Students' abilities to answer questions requiring application of concepts and even elementary-level problem-solving strategies were alarmingly far off the levels required by future life and work settings.

Only 6.4% of the seventeen-year-olds could solve a multistep problem like the one in Figure 5 (which requires only simple knowledge of number facts, but which demands some persistence.)

One mathematics specialist recently told me she anticipates a growing "crisis" in analytic thought and problem-solving. As an example, she cited a group of "typical" middle school students who, she discovered, could multiply four-digit numbers with ease but were unable to deal with word problems like the following:

"A man bought four shirts at $19.95. How much did he spend?"

"They can compute, but they don't seem to be able to stop, think, and reason about the processes involved," she concluded.

Who should be teaching children the real-life basics of problem-solving? Adults need to be available -- at home and at school -- to act as models and guides at every stage of development. Jerome Bruner calls this "loaning children our consciousness." [20] But the models must themselves have the mental abilities in question. There are as many routes up the ladder -- neural and mental -- as there are different types of learning. When parents make decisions about who will have the job of caring for their children, they are signing up the intelligence and the consciousness that will shape those growing minds.



The Starving Executive: A Hypothesis

I believe the brain's executive systems and their links to lower centers for attention and motivation are particularly at risk for children today. These late-developing areas, which may be particularly sensitive to environmental deprivation, are responsible for many so-called "control functions." [21]

Individuals who have suffered damage to prefrontal areas (depending somewhat on the location of the injury) behave much like children with attention problems: [22, 23]

• inattentiveness; distractibility; tendency to be "stimulus bound"
• lack of organization, planning, and programming of behavior
• difficulty delaying gratification and working toward future goals
• difficulty inhibiting inappropriate behavior
• dissociation between talk and follow-through
• problems with complex and conceptual verbal activities
• inability to regulate and sustain motivation
• difficulty controlling emotional responses
• deficits in selective attention

I am not implying here that children with attention problems are "brain damaged" in the same sense as adult frontal-lobe patients. I am suggesting that they may never have fully developed these abilities in the first place and thus may behave similarly to people who once had the functions but lost them through injury to the brain areas involved.

When Should Children Start to Learn Self-Control?

Researchers have been unsure when the various functions of the prefrontal lobes normally begin to mature. We know their growth continues into the twenties -- and that they comprise the longest of the brain's developmental processes. One of the most important tasks of the adolescent brain, in fact, is to refine these control systems and learn to use them effectively. [24]

In a recent review, Dr. Pennington and his colleague Dr. Marilyn Welsh presented evidence that prefrontal abilities begin to emerge even earlier than anyone imagined, in the first year of life. According to these authors, even preschoolers may suffer from "subtle prefrontal dysfunction" that mainly takes the form of a lack of self-control, lack of "active information gathering" (e. g., systematically exploring the physical environment, asking questions). With older children, poor problem-solving is a prominent indicator of difficulty. These researchers call attention to the fact that "many childhood learning and behavior disorders are manifested in the context of normal IQ and some subset of these may be the result of a specific frontal dysfunction." [25]

If Luria was correct about inner speech being the mechanism that "feeds" the development of the frontal cortex, and if this area's development continues as long as researchers believe, it seems reasonable to assume that lifestyles that bombard children with noise, constant activity, and limited access to thoughtful adult models might certainly jeopardize its development. Many children today do not get much exposure to what reflective thought looks or feels like. Many live in homes or attend care centers where hurried, overworked, or undertrained adults don't have time to provide one-on-one scaffolding or to sense where that critical "zone of proximal development" lies. Others are tended by caretakers who do too much for the child and thus block the internalization of responsibility. Many attend schools that try to cram the storehouse full, while disregarding the necessity for internal motivation, talking -- and thinking -- to oneself, and personal coaching for problem-solving. A great deal of babysitting is done by a mesmerizing screen that reduces problems to two-minute "bits" in a generic "zone of proximal development." No wonder many of our children have trouble.

No one knows whether or when critical or sensitive periods occur for specific functions of the prefrontal cortex, but this principle may well apply here as well as to the rest of the brain. How long is the window open? Dr. Kenneth Klivington of the Salk Institute and an editor of The Brain, Cognition, and Education [26] says he thinks it is important for scientists to try to find out. "Attention is fundamental to any learning process, but no one knows if there is a critical period for attention. To my knowledge, there are no scientific studies of this fact, but there are so many capabilities that have critical periods in their development, it could also be that attention and logical thinking are the same. If so, once you pass that critical age, there's little likelihood of your being able to learn it," he told me recently.

"I wonder what that age would be," I replied.

"I don't know, but it's probably in the early teens -- that's just guesswork on my part. It's important to raise those kinds of issues because the experiments need to be done, and unless those issues are spelled out and brought to people's attention, nobody's going to do the experiments," he continued. "They're hard experiments and may not even be possible to do, but it's important to try. We need to obtain further evidence if there are critical periods in attention or logical thinking."

"In the meanwhile, how would you advise parents?" I asked Dr. Klivington.

"I continue to place the emphasis on the need to generate language and thought, not just listen and watch," he answered immediately. [27] "If we consider the brain as the organ of thought, it has to be structured right to work right. If you don't wire up your computer right, it isn't going to work right."

SUMMARY: LIFESTYLES AND LEARNING

Attention and learning abilities depend both on the way the brains of the learners are innately structured and the uses for which they are trained. The success of any learning experience depends on the interaction between a brain's strengths and weaknesses and the demands of the learning situation. Some children's learning abilities are damaged by overt or subtle environmental impairment, but the term "learning disability" now often simply describes an unexplained misfit between child and school. Attention deficit disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia are examples of disabilities that may sometimes have a genetic component but that also reflect strong effects of environmental training.

The growing brain is resilient, but may eventually be compromised by combinations of factors ranging from exposure to toxic substances, over- or understimulation, or lack of availability of appropriate adults to provide scaffolds for intellectual growth. Particularly important are inner speech, attention, and problem-solving strategies attributed to prefrontal development in the brain.

Environments can cause problems if (1) the specific demands they place for learning are misfitted to the brains of the learners, or (2) if they fail to instill in developing minds the fundamental skills of attention and reasoning. Increasing numbers of children today show evidence of weakness in attention, language, and reasoning, yet teachers continue to assume the presence of these skills and tend to blame the students for their unwillingness to pay attention to content and method for which their brains have been poorly adapted.

If adults in a society have things they want children to pay attention to, they must make available the consciousness that will develop the habits of mind -- and thus the structures of the brain -- to make it possible.

[admin]

Part Four: CLASHING CULTURES

CHAPTER 10: TV, Video Games, and the Growing Brain

It turns kids into zombies!
Children are active while viewing.
Television shortens attention spans.
There is no evidence that television viewing affects children's attention spans.
Video games make people right-brained.
Children today are smarter because of television.
Video use is killing off literacy.

Everyone has opinions about the effects on learning of television and other uses of video. What is the truth? What does viewing do to the developing brain? How much does growing up in the culture of visual immediacy affect a child's performance in the culture of academic learning?

When I began writing this book, one of my first questions was how much video use has played into the changes observed in children's learning habits. I soon found out: (1) good research on TV is hard to find, (2) much of what is purveyed as "fact" has not been thoroughly documented, (3) according to the most recent studies, television's effects may be more subtle, but also more powerful and pervasive than most people believe and (4) virtually no research is available on the effects of video tapes or computerized video games on children's mental development. Moreover, because more children now spend more hours with all video media than ever before, effects which might not have become apparent in previous decades may just now be showing up in schools.

Calling a Very Large Duck a Duck

All video has effects on mental activity; some of its uses are clearly more positive for academic learning than others. Good television programming has made a wealth of information available to children, although this benefit alone does not make them smarter if they lack the habits of mind to use it effectively. Good-quality videocassettes for children may also enhance cognitive and perhaps even language development if they encourage response from the child and if viewing is mediated by an adult. Many young children now use a familiar videotape as a sort of security blanket with which to relax. Rock videos, on the other hand, have aroused concern, not only about their effects on young brains, but on other aspects of development as well.

Let us first consider television. I was surprised to learn how much a part of young children's lives TV has become. American youngsters, on average, now spend more hours in front of the set than at any other activity except sleeping. Sesame Street has helped institutionalize the viewing habit for preschoolers, many of whom begin watching several hours a day of varied programming at about age two. By ages three to five -- the height of the brain's critical period for cognitive and language development -- estimates place viewing time of the average child at twenty-eight hours a week. For many children, extended hours in front of the set have drastically curtailed active playtime. Average viewing time for elementary students runs at about twenty-five hours a week, and for high schoolers, twenty-eight hours a week, approximately six times the hours spent doing homework. [1-4] No estimates are available on time spent with videotapes.

In many households, even infants are constantly exposed; programs replace family conversation that builds language and listening skills, reading aloud, and games and activities in which adults show children how to solve problems, talk out future plans, or deal with their own emotions. Many parents who would earnestly like to redirect their family time find the kids so "hooked" on viewing, says Marie Winn, that they "reject all those fine family alternatives" -- mainly because watching television is easier. [5] Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds watch the most of all. [6]

Where Is the Research?

Scientists are acutely aware that large doses of any type of experience have shaping power over the growing brain. Have they, therefore, been hotly researching the effects of large doses of television? No!

A relatively small number of studies have looked at TV's effects on learning, but when I initiated computer-assisted searches of all studies and articles ever published in the fields of medicine, psychology, child development, and education on TV's effects on brain development, I came up with a virtually empty net. As I queried experts and burrowed further into sources of professional information, I learned the truth: no sustained effort has been made to find out how TV might affect the basic neural foundations for learning. Moreover, many of the "facts" purveyed about television's effects -- not only on brains but on learning in general -- are based on wobbly research.

Appropriate, non harmful technology for studying living brains while they are reading, learning, remembering -- or watching the tube -- has become increasingly accessible. For example, by pasting electrodes to the scalp and hooking them up to a computer, scientists can monitor brain waves and map mental activity in living color! [7] Good research is admittedly hard to do, but I find it surprising that no effort has been made even to get it started. Since the scientific community's research proposals tend to cluster around any topic where funding is available, the obvious conclusion is that the interest -- i.e., money -- has not been there. Most of the few available studies, in fact, were done by advertisers who wanted to know how to grab and hold the brain's attention -- whether the "subject" chose to be spellbound or not. (More about this later.) When some early results began to indicate that the actual physical act of viewing may cause the brain to enter a hypnotic, nonlearning state, the research trickle abruptly dried up.

One might certainly be tempted to conclude that no one is very eager to get the answers to the questions. And, of course, it is more comfortable to believe that TV's effects on learning are not particularly harmful. As I began writing this chapter, headlines throughout the United States were seized by a new, quasi-scientific "review of research" which seemed to suggest just that. Statements such as the following were quoted:

"There is little evidence to show that brain viewing reduces children's attention span. . . ."

"There is no evidence that television makes children cognitively passive."

Unfortunately, these articles were, in the words of the study's author, Dr. Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts, "badly distorted." They failed to mention, first, the primary reason there is "little evidence" is that there has been little research! Moreover, some of the few reliable studies which have been done suggest just the opposite! Here are some other statements from that report that didn't make the headlines:

Television may indeed:

• overstimulate children and create passive withdrawal
• cause attention and listening problems (e.g., paying attention to an activity such as drawing pictures instead of to a teacher delivering instruction)
• make children need "the classroom equivalent of special effects" to maintain attention
• emphasize skills which do not transfer well to reading or listening [8]

"No, I am not at all satisfied with the quality of the research that has been done," Dr. Anderson told me. "There has been no agency willing to consistently fund research on the cognitive effects of television.'' [9]

"There is really no satisfactory data," agrees Yale's Dr. Jerome Singer, another of a handful of well-respected national authorities on children and television. "But it's amazing how we fail to appreciate the fact that children spend more time in front of TV than in school. Of course there are cumulative effects!"

Dr. Singer believes that it is best to withhold television completely until reading and learning habits are well established. He mentioned during the course of our conversation that his son, who has been a father himself for several years, delayed purchasing a television set as part of "an active decision" to significantly limit family viewing. [10]

Cognitive Consequences of TV Viewing

One problem with studies comparing viewers and nonviewers is that it is now impossible to find large numbers of American children who have not been exposed to the medium. Research clearly shows, however, that better students tend to watch less. Moreover, as viewing goes up, academic achievement scores eventually go down.

In a thoroughly documented and objective review article published in the Reading Research Quarterly, two scientists from Leiden University in the Netherlands culled the most reliable data on the relationship of viewing and reading, including some obtained when television first became available in several different countries. They found that television's negative effects on reading skills were particularly strong for the more advanced abilities needed for higher-level comprehension. Among other conclusions, they stated that television:

• displaces leisure reading and thus inhibits the growth of reading skills
• requires less mental effort than reading
• may shorten the time children are willing to spend on finding an answer to intellectual problems they are set to solve
• has particularly negative effects for heavy viewers, socially advantaged children, and intelligent children [11]

Curiously, these quotes never made the headlines either.

Much more research is needed to establish guidelines for the constructive use of this enormously influential medium. We know far too little about how media in general, and "educational" programming in particular, can aid literacy, school learning, and knowledge acquisition.

VIDEO AND THE BRAIN

Does viewing cause brains to become hyperactive? Passive? Tuned out? Can it change brain structure and function in ways that alter learning potential? Attempts to study brain activation and/or patterns of brain waves of viewers have been the main means by which studies -- reliable or otherwise -- have searched for answers to these questions. Babies', children's, and adults' brain waves change in response to television, but little has been proven about the types of changes that occur. [12] Three effects on learning abilities, all related to attention, have been suggested: (1) some television and videotape programming artificially manipulate the brain into paying attention by violating certain of its natural defenses with frequent visual and auditory changes (known as "saliency"); (2) television induces neural passivity and reduces "stick-to-it-iveness"; (3) television may have a hypnotic, and possibly neurologically addictive, effect on the brain by changing the frequency of its electrical impulses in ways that block active mental processing.

(1) Forcing the Brain to Pay Attention

Studies sponsored by advertisers have suggested the best way to get viewers to pay attention to their messages is to capitalize on the brain's instinctive responses to danger. First, sudden close-ups, pans, and zooms are effective in alerting the brain because they violate its reflex need to maintain a predictable "personal space" -- a certain distance between oneself and others. Second, "salient" features such as bright colors, quick movements, or sudden noises get attention fast, since brains are programmed to be extremely sensitive to such changes that might signal danger.

Television advertisers and most children's programs, including Sesame Street, are planned with an eye to capitalizing on these involuntary responses. When the Sesame Street format was initially designed, pilot studies were conducted in which children were shown program segments alongside competing "distractors" such as colorful slides. Thus the programmers learned that the use of many "salient" effects would keep children watching -- whether they wanted to or not. [13]

In a sense, these carefully planned manipulations separate the natural responses of brain and body; although the viewer's attention is alerted, there is no need for physical action. The brain registers specific changes after a camera zoom, for example, responding as if to real danger. [14] Yet the impulse has no outlet. Researchers soon began to suggest that children thus stimulated, without natural physical outlets for the pent-up response, might develop overactivity, frustration, or irritability. [15,16] In 1975, two Australian researchers predicted with increasing viewing time spent by children there would be a proportionate increase in disorders of attention. [17]

It has been hard to "prove" that this prophecy has come true, although virtually every teacher I interviewed is convinced that it has. Dr. Dan Anderson's review report summarizes several studies in which "there does appear to be some effect of TV on attention, although the importance, generality, and nature of the effect is unknown." [18]

One reasonably well-documented fact, also according to this report, is that children's attention to TV programs tends to be fragmented, in the sense that they are actually watching it only about two-thirds of the time they spend in viewing. They may simultaneously engage in other activities or simply look away for "reduction of stimulation" -- until they are drawn back by another special effect.

Television is physiologically arousing, confirms Dr. Byron Reeves of the Department of Communication at Stanford, who conducted studies of viewers' electrical brain activity. Their brains did, indeed, respond to movement as if it were actually present, causing the nervous system to prepare for a physical response. Personally, Reeves told me he also believes these habits show up in school, as children become habituated to "surprise and circus-type" presentations.

"I see it with my college sophomores," he remarked wryly. "We all know a Sesame Street presentation gets more attention these days." [19] Manipulations of "arousal mechanisms" that separate brain and body may be related to reports from psychologists and teachers that today's children are increasingly "touch starved." A heavy diet of vicarious viewing that replaces real sensory involvement is directly antagonistic to the most basic principles of a young child's learning. Much early development of physical and mental skills -- and of their foundations in the brain -- comes from experimenting and solving problems with real-world materials. The long-term outcomes of forcing children's attention unnaturally may have even more serious implications than we have realized.

Jerking children's attention around may cause a certain amount of emotional withdrawal, as well. Young children, while involuntarily captured by novelty, really need repetition and familiarity. Anchoring experience in this way helps them gain a sense of organization and mastery. Parents who laughingly complain about how tired they are of reading the same book ("Sometimes I think if I have to do Goodnight Moon one more time ... ") or seeing the same story on tape are the best witnesses to a child's overriding need for familiarity. Such predictability may be particularly necessary for learning to make sense out of a world that is already sufficiently confusing.

(2) Passive Brains?

Good learning and good problem-solving require active involvement and persistence. Failures at this level are related to many types of learning disabilities. Many people intuitively feel that exposure in early childhood to a great deal of television may create passive learners who give up too easily. Proof is now starting to emerge.

One prominent researcher, Dr. Jennings Bryant of the University of Alabama, is personally convinced that TV "certainly changes things" as far as active learning is concerned.

"One thing we do know," he explained recently, "is that it reduces what we call vigilance [the ability to remain actively focused on a task]. If they watch lots of fast-paced programs and then we give them things to do afterward such as reading or solving complex puzzles, their stick-to-it-iveness is diminished; they're not as willing to stay with the task. Over time, with lots of viewing, you're going to have less vigilant children. This is especially critical with relatively young children -- about three to five years seem to be particularly vulnerable times [emphasis added]."

Dr. Bryant, who served on a research and planning committee for Sesame Street's sibling, The Electric Company, told me he now believes that choosing such a fast-paced format for both programs was a mistake.

"Unfortunately," he said, "I don't think Sesame Street is one of the good examples. We worked so hard to grab the child's attention in the competitive media environment that sometimes I'm afraid we forgot the learning. We may have been teaching the wrong thing -- learning externally instead of internally. We may have created a child who was so reinforced to go after the excitement, the blazing stars, etc., that the learning was almost secondary."

Dr. Bryant says he decided, on the basis of his research, to sit down and watch with his own children to make them aware of "how this medium can manipulate." Now they're good students, active problem-solvers, and "very selective and cynical TV consumers."

Dr. Bryant also thinks that it is probably a mistake to let children do homework in front of the set. He says that his newest research shows how competing video messages get in the way of learning and cause homework to take longer and be done less well. Programs with many auditory-orienting devices to call attention to the screen make it especially hard to focus actively on learning. [20]

Research, overall, strongly suggests that fast pace and special effects can interfere with development of active learning habits. A few studies have shown that children try to organize meaning, follow plots, and make sense out of what is happening in programs or tapes that are of interest to them, but only if they are old enough and can understand the material presented. Studies show attention tends to wander when the material is seen either as "boring" or not readily understandable; then, when something salient happens, attention is drawn back. This conditioned pattern of sporadic, externally directed attention corresponds precisely with what teachers are reporting. In class or when doing homework, one can't just let the mind change channels or wander away when things become a bit difficult or "boring."

If "receptive" learning (e.g., reading, listening) is affected by TV-induced passivity, the more active "expressive" skills, such as organizing and getting ideas down in writing, are in even greater jeopardy. Even television's staunchest defenders admit that it is primarily a receptive medium that in itself provides little practice in expression of any kind.

Dr. Anderson, who has been accused by other authorities of interpreting the research too generously in favor of television (some of his work, in fact, has been commissioned by Children's Television Workshop, which produces Sesame Street [21]), himself admits that "television viewing probably does not require many of the self-generated cognitive processes required by writing; as receptive cognition it is likely different in many ways from productive cognition." [22] Moreover, he acknowledges, it is likely that it "reduces task perseverance and this affects reading comprehension." [23]

(3) The "Zombie" Effect

Does television suppress mental activity by putting viewers into a trance? The few studies made of the human brain in the process of viewing, while hardly definitive, suggest that it may, at least in some individuals and with some kinds of content.

In one early experiment, an electrode was pasted to the scalp of a woman while she first looked through a magazine and then watched television commercials. As she was reading the magazine, her brain registered active alertness, but switching to TV viewing "instantly produced a preponderance of slow (alpha) waves," which are classically associated with lack of mental activity. [24]

Unfortunately, little research followed. In 1980, researchers Merrelyn and Fred Emery, at the University of Australia, reviewed a meager crop of studies and found reason for concern that prolonged television viewing might cause a syndrome of mental inactivity that would interfere with thinking and concentrating. In an article titled "The Vacuous Vision," they suggested that as viewing time by youngsters increased "this prolonged idleness of the prefrontal cortex" would have serious consequences. [25]

Although it has been shown that alpha levels can be altered by training, [26] no one has conclusively proven that persistent viewing invariably changes basic brain patterns, although several other studies have also given loose support to slower brain activation (more alpha) from TV when compared with magazine advertisements. Only three can be found comparing brain waves during television viewing versus reading of regular text. Two of the three confirmed higher levels of more passive alpha while watching television and higher levels of fast-wave beta activity during reading. [27, 28]

The third study, an unpublished doctoral-dissertation, may be the most important of all: it suggested that active brain response depended more on the subject's involvement with the material than on the medium itself. [29] This researcher found that interesting, more complex (but still comprehensible) reading or television could be used to elicit fast brain activity, while more simple, uninteresting, or incomprehensible material induced more slow alpha activity, irrespective of the medium. It seems probable that if the subject "tunes out" because the content seems incomprehensible, brain waves would follow. Research to be examined in the next chapter suggests that even programs specifically directed at children may be largely incomprehensible to them, even when adults think they are understanding what they see.

Other studies have described a phenomenon apparently related to the "zombielike" responses of some viewers: "attentional inertia." The longer a look at TV continues, the greater the probability it will be maintained. For example, if a child gets "glued" to the set during a program, the more likely he is to remain fixated when the scene breaks to a commercial. Mothers who have trouble summoning their children to chores, homework, or even supper are already aware that the longer a child has been watching TV, the slower he is to respond when someone calls his name. While Dr. Anderson and colleagues take this only as a sign of "increased engagement with the TV," others fear that such nondiscriminating responses verge on "mindlessness." [30] Anecdotal reports suggest that this phenomenon is more severe in some individuals than in others.

"You raise kids on sweets, they become addicted to sweets. You raise kids on alpha, they get addicted to alpha, just like any hypnotic state," commented one neuropsychologist, himself a member of the TV generation and the father of a young child (who is allowed to watch TV in highly selected quantities). He recognizes that parents in high-stress jobs may crave a soothing dose of alpha for themselves after a hard day's work, but believes this habit is not desirable for immature brains that have not yet firmed up all their connections. "The brain is programmed to repeat the same experience; neurons learn to replicate a pattern, that's how people learn, but we don't realize that what we are really learning is habits. Whenever children are doing something for a lot of the time, we should ask: Is this a habit we want them to have?" [31]

Taken all together, this sorely limited research suggests that children may be physiologically compelled to "space out" when viewing fatuous, overly difficult, or confusing content. Since the brain builds its internal connections primarily in response to active mental effort, I am willing to make the leap and suggest, by inducing our children to habituate their brains to too much easy video pleasure, we may truly risk weakening their mental abilities. Studies have shown, when young animals are placed in an enclosure from which they can merely watch others playing, that their brain growth is proportionately reduced, no matter how stimulating the visual environment.

THE VIDEO GAME ADDICTION

If I didn't make him eat, sleep, and go to school, he would be at that thing twenty-four hours a day! -- Mother of an eleven-year-old boy

Computerized video games appear to be even more addictive for many children than television. Why do they exert such a hypnotic force? What will happen to kids who spend every available moment seeking ever greater conquests in a fantasy microworld? Could this preoccupation possibly be educational? Will it build up imagination and nonverbal abilities -- or will it limit them by keeping the child from normal play and human interaction? Will children learn new strategies of problem-solving -- or will they lose the ability to initiate ideas unless prompted by a machine? Unfortunately, even less is known about the long-term implications of this new "addiction" in American life. The child-development experts I have queried have given only cautious responses -- most of them negative. One of the main points they always mention is the issue of "transfer," that is, how much we can expect experiences with one type of input -- such as video games -- to build up abilities that can be used elsewhere -- such as reading or more general types of reasoning.

The Problem of "Transfer"

One of the main problems with speculations on the effects of machines is that what may seem "obvious" about what children are learning from them may not be true at all. For example, we might reason that anything improving children's visual-spatial skills (e.g., playing fast-paced video games where objects coming from all directions at once must be shot at or avoided) should also improve their reading speed, or even their geometry abilities, which are known to call heavily on visual spatial reasoning. Many people have similarly reasoned that teaching children to program a computer, with its immutable demands for logical, linear thought, must certainly teach them to think more logically.

Unfortunately, however, the brain often seems to have difficulty applying skills it has learned in one specific arena to other kinds of problems. When teachers ask, "How well will this learning transfer?" they are referring to the fact that teaching children how to outline a story in English class does not necessarily mean they will automatically apply the same skills to their history textbook -- unless someone specifically shows them how, and they practice the same outlining with the history book. Expecting some kinds of learning to transfer is a little bit like expecting jogging to build up finger dexterity; just because the body (or the brain) is exercised, we cannot assume that the activity will "take" other than in the specific area that receives the practice.

The brain has many millions of separate cell networks or "assemblies," and does not seem to generalize very readily from one set to another. For example, after hundreds of studies showing that eye exercises involving complex designs have little effect on reading ability for most children, experts concluded that reading is the best way to improve reading. There is no evidence that the general visual stimulation of watching TV improves visual reasoning abilities in other domains. Nor does listening to music improve auditory skills for language, because words and melody are processed by totally different cell networks.

Training in more fundamental "habits of mind," such as planning organized steps to reason through problems -- at home, at school, or anywhere else -- may well be more generalizable. Showing children how to apply critical analysis to both reading and video is a good example of "teaching for transfer" in today's world.

Another issue raised by video games is that children may be accomplishing higher-level tasks with low-level strategies. Just because a child appears to have "mastered" a game where he is required to work his way through various levels of decision-making does not necessarily mean he has learned any new mental operations. He may simply have mastered a routine through trial and error.

It seems fairly safe to say that much of children's experience with such games will have little, if any, transfer value to traditional school tasks. While the schools should think about how they might make use of skills learned outside the classroom to further learning, no one has figured out how to make intellectual capital out of "Space Invaders." On the other hand, we do know that lack of use can definitely affect potential for brain connections. If a child spends an inordinate amount of time on video games (or television, or even other types of computer use) instead of playing and experimenting with many different types of skills, the foundations for some kinds of abilities may be sacrificed. These losses may not show up until much later, when more complicated kinds of thinking and learning become necessary. Tender young brains need broad horizons, not overbuilt neural pathways in one specific skill area. This point is extremely important as we return to the topic that has many parents worried -- for good reason.

Mania for Mastery

Video games such as "Nintendo" augment some of the most riveting aspects of television viewing with the built-in reward systems of computer games. These are many children's introduction to the computer's "artificial intelligence." Much like their elder counterparts termed "computer hackers," children enmeshed with this powerful alter ego seem to be hooked by lures that ordinary activities simply do not exert. [32] Here are the games' secret weapons:

• feelings of control and mastery by the players
• exact calibration of the level of difficulty to the player
• immediate and continual reinforcement
• escape from the unpredictability of human social/emotional relationships

As with television viewing, moreover, human brains are easy prey for the demanding, colorful, fast-paced visual formats.

Human nature drives us all to master problems. A golfer may think her life's goal is to break 100, but once she is consistently scoring in the high 90's, is she content -- or, more likely, does she set a new goal to break 95? Video games are perfectly designed to promise mastery -- in gradual degrees, which keep the player coming back for just a little more of this heady potion. The child is always presented with slightly greater challenges, individually calibrated and always tantalizingly within reach -- with continued practice. Each effort, successful or unsuccessful, is promptly reinforced; the machine becomes a personalized tutor. Even children with attention problems in other settings respond to such immediacy.

Mastery leads to a sense of power, which feels especially good to a child in a world where things seem pretty much out of control, and where teachers order children around a lot of the time. Many of the games play directly on this need.

Can these games be educational? Some have suggested that they may be training children in skills which will be needed in the future but for which we don't yet know the uses. Many teachers comment, however, that frequent players have trouble readjusting from the microworld to that of a classroom, which offers much less sensory "saliency," not a whole lot of power, and less individual attention and gratification. Some, of course, suggest that what we really need to do is make school as personally rewarding as the games.

"If we could just convince children that learning to read, and do math would make them powerful, too . . ." one teacher wistfully suggested.

Although some preliminary research suggests that perceptual-motor (specifically, eye-hand) skills may be improved by the games, there is apparently little transfer to school tasks, including writing. In addition, although the player's attention is, indeed, riveted, there has been no evidence of transfer of attention to other kinds of learning. [33]

Do such games teach children to be better problem-solvers? After all, success in many is predicated on making a series of correct decisions. Dr. Linda Siegel, authority on child development and education, has wondered about this possibility. She suspects, however, that the ability to use logical thinking may actually be impaired rather than improved in children conditioned to this visual, holistic environment.

"We should be thinking hard about what these games really encourage. I'm not convinced they really promote decision-making," she told me. "I watch these kids playing and I wonder if those decisions are made on a rational basis, or if it is just chance. Are they developing systems of rules in their minds, or are they just responding intuitively? They seem to be in control, but how much control do they really have? And if it's intuitive rather than logical, is it thinking?" [34]

It would be nice if we had some answers to these questions. In the meanwhile, parents should remember that they are still in charge of the household. Aren't they?

BRAINS THAT READ VS. BRAINS THAT WATCH TV

One thing television does is it keeps kids from reading. Reading triggers certain experiences in the brain that just don't happen if you don't read. I think our brains are designed to symbolize and represent information in the way that we call language. If we don't exercise it, we lose it. Television, even Sesame Street, is not very symbolic. It makes things very tangible and easy to understand, but reading is the kind of exercise that causes the brain to develop differently because it uses that symbolic capability. -- Dr. M. Russell Harter [35]

Children's brains develop connections within and between areas depending on the type of exercise they get. A "good" brain for learning develops strong and widespread neural highways that can quickly and efficiently assign different aspects of a task to the most efficient system. Such a brain is able to "talk" to itself, instantly sending messages from one area to another. Such efficiency is developed only by active practice in thinking and learning which, in turn, builds increasingly stronger connections. A growing suspicion among brain researchers is that excessive television viewing may affect development of these kinds of connections. It may also induce habits of using the wrong systems for various types of learning.

The only sources of data -- both direct and indirect -- on this topic are studies comparing the effects of viewing with those of reading. Although, as always, the data are slim, they suggest that reading and watching TV make quite different demands on the brain and thus encourage different kinds of development. As with any activity, repeated exposure, particularly during sensitive periods, has the potential to cause lasting changes.

"If a certain part of the brain is available for reading and that part doesn't serve a reading function, a reorganization may take place that allows another function to become more developed," adds Dr. Harter, a major investigator in one of the first large-scale studies of reading and the developing brain, now being conducted at the University of North Carolina.

Intensive viewing has the potential for at least three effects on the growing brain, any of which could interfere with a child's natural potential for intelligence and creativity: (1) it may reduce stimulation to left-hemisphere systems critical for development of language, reading, and analytic thinking; (2) it may affect mental ability and attention by diminishing mental traffic between the hemispheres; (3) it may discourage development of "executive" systems that regulate attention, organization, and motivation. Without a solid research base, we can take only a speculative look at each of the three.

Does Television Unbalance the Brain?

The medium (at least in the United States), by maximizing quick cuts, which permit little critical analysis, and the visual presentation of violence or disaster, assures retention of global imagery content (right-brain functions?) at the cost of the more orderly and logical verbal and analytical processes (left brain?). Reading, by contrast, can present equally sensational information. . . but it requires a more active stance by the reader who must project his or her own imagery onto a more orderly array of verbal information. [36] -- Dr. Jerome Singer, Yale University

The fear most often expressed about extended television viewing is that it robs the left hemisphere of developmental time and space. Over a decade ago, Marie Winn speculated that television's "repeated and time-consuming nonverbal, primarily visual activity" and negative patterns of "nonverbal cognition" [37] might interfere with "left brain" functions, disrupting language and reading development. Two years later the Emerys suggested that non-verbal systems in the right hemisphere were being overstimulated by TV and that even "advantaged" children would be harmed if neural pathways essential to the development of spoken and written language and critical thought were not fully developed. [38]

Little credible research has been conducted to compare hemispheric activity during viewing vs. reading. What is available suggests that, relative to television, print media generate more left-brain than right-brain activity. [39]

Syntax vs. Saliency

While it is physically impossible to stimulate one side of a normal brain without engaging the other as well, it may be possible to "unbalance" development by neglecting certain types of input. Skilled reading depends heavily on (left-hemisphere) auditory language abilities. [40, 41] (Many good readers may not even be aware that they "hear" sentences in their head as they read.) Children who lean too heavily on (right-hemisphere) visual, holistic strategies (they remember or guess what a word says only by the way it "looks" -- first letter, shape, etc.) run into trouble when the text gets harder, when words get longer, and when they must read or spell accurately. Symptoms include inaccurate oral reading ("vacation" for "vacancy") and difficulty reading or spelling syllables in the right sequence ("renuramate" for "remunerate"). Children who never learn to process (understand and remember) language without pictures attached also have difficulty in school when they must listen to a teacher or to the author of a textbook. They keep looking around for meaning instead of creating it inside their own heads.

As we saw in Chapter 4, television is a poor teacher of language because it is not interactive and because it cannot tailor conversation, as can parents, to the needs of the individual child. Even seriously disadvantaged children do not seem to gain linguistic benefits from extended hours of TV. A number of studies have shown that children get information from television primarily through attention to visual action and nonverbal sounds (booms, crashes, music), not through following the dialogue. [42] To understand a complex plot or make sense of speech on television, they would have to overlook the highly salient features and focus instead on such "nonsalient" aspects as low action or normal human speech. Yet, as programs are increasingly designed to attract attention, the child viewer gains the habit of ignoring language in favor of visual and auditory gimmicks. Syntax is a very poor second to saliency.

As I watch children's programming, I am struck by the following (L or R indicates the hemisphere presumably more involved in each case):

• Holistic visual action (R) dominates oral language (L).
• Sound effects are mainly novel noises (R), not sequential speech (L).
• Language modeling consists primarily of vocabulary words -- semantic (R and L) rather than grammatical -- syntactic sequences of words or phrases (L).
• Rapid movement and novelty (R) are almost continual.
• Exaggerated emotional tone (R) characterizes many of the characters' responses.
• Color (R) is a predominant feature.
• Immediacy (R) dominates logical sequence (L) of episodes.
• There is little time for analysis (L) of anything, particularly what the characters say.
• Perception of the sounds (L) in the speech of the characters is very difficult, even for an adult brain.

Robbing left-hemisphere systems of valuable developmental exercise may tip the balance for brains constitutionally at risk for learning problems. Could it put more normal brains at risk? As the hours add up -- who knows? Will minds schooled by television relinquish the special form of intellectual precision afforded our species by the evolution of language in the left hemisphere? No one can answer this question, either, but a lot of teachers have their own opinions.

Changing Brains: Neural Imprints of Literacy

While research has yet to show whether watching television permanently changes the brain, it has suggested that literacy does. Because reading and writing are skills not innate or even inevitable for the human brain, they require training and practice. The practice, in turn, seems to develop both brain and thought patterns in certain specialized ways.

Indeed, I am considering the possibility that the adoption of the alphabet by Western cultures has had a reordering effect on the brain and the whole nervous system of literate people. . . . [43] -- Derrick de Kerckhove in The Alphabet and the Brain

Scientists are having fun trying to find out how learning to use an alphabet, particularly one that is read from left to right, might change the way a human brain functions. Clues have come mainly from two types of studies, as yet far from conclusive: some showing that illiterate people tend to have less strongly developed left-hemisphere language-processing than people who can read, and some showing that people who learn to read both a letter-type and a picture-type script, as in Japan, tend to process language more equally between the two sides of the brain than do people who read only letter-type scripts. [44, 45]

Good and poor readers commonly show up with differences in brain function. Part of the reason may be that brains that read more develop differently. "Good readers may spend more time reading than poor readers, and this could conceivably affect brain lateralization," reports one noted team of researchers. [46]

Brains that read in unusual ways also develop differently. Studies similar to those discussed in an earlier chapter show that deaf readers use the two sides of their brain divergently. Deaf readers, we must recall, rarely process beyond third- or fourth-grade-level reading ability in spite of intelligence and teaching; not surprisingly, they tend to use right hemisphere (more visual) systems instead of left (more auditory). [47] Is it only a coincidence that the reading abilities of today's hearing students also begin to level off and then start to drop at/about the same point where most deaf readers get stuck?

Teaching That Changes Brains

Dr. Dirk Bakker, of the Free University and Paedological Institute in Amsterdam, believes that the way children use their hemispheres can be changed with surprisingly little effort. Using different methods of reading instruction, he has altered brain function and also improved reading scores.

Bakker insists that reading problems result when children use their hemispheres inappropriately. Part of this "functional overdevelopment" may be inherited, but experience can at least partially restore the balance. To get these brains more effectively organized for reading, Bakker uses training in which he tries to strengthen the weak system causing the problem.

Bakker's students improve their reading, but, more important, they also show "training-induced electrical changes in brain asymmetry" (changes in relative strength of brain waves over the two hemispheres) that correlate with the changes in their reading abilities. It is particularly notable -- and a little frightening -- that the teachers achieved these changes in hemispheric activity with only twenty-two weekly sessions of forty-five minutes each! [48, 49] Although it has not yet been shown that the brains were permanently altered in any major way by such brief training, these experiments offer hope that early elementary school years still provide an opening for reeducating underactive neurons. [50]

Most researchers are skeptical of what Marcel Kinsbourne terms "dichotomania" -- the tendency to look at everything in terms of right versus left hemisphere. Children must learn to use -- and thus help develop -- both sides and the connections between them. Higher-order reasoning and putting language meaning together with the visual input are particularly important. In these respects skilled reading is a much better trainer than television.

Mental and Physical Effort -- or Withered Brains?

TV isn't tapping any higher-order integrative processes. It's much more dangerous than simply engaging children's right hemispheres. Both hemispheres can watch TV, but they do it with lower-level systems, mainly visual ones. The issue is not right or left, but the type of processing that gets stimulated. -- Dr. Wendy Heller. [51]

Authorities now suspect that the ability to activate and coordinate the work of both hemispheres may be even more important than developing individual systems in either side. They argue we should not allow viewing to replace physical play (e. g., running, kicking, climbing, throwing), handwork (e.g., building, working with clay, needlework, origami), doing puzzles, playing games, or other activities through which the two sides of the body -- and their related connections in the brain -- learn to coordinate with each other.

The corpus callosum, the thick bridge of fibers connecting the hemispheres, is one of the brain's latest-maturing parts. It ultimately makes possible important skills such as flexible manipulation of ideas, mature creative imagination, and effective interplay between analytic and intuitive thinking (e.g., seeing the way details fit inside the "big picture"; implementing an action plan for a creative idea). Poor development of this critical link between the hemispheres can result in learning and attention problems. [52]

Because of its late maturation, the corpus callosum may be extremely vulnerable to lack of practice. After an initial spurt of growth during the first two years of life, it probably continues to develop at a slow, relatively steady pace until somewhere between ages eight and fourteen. As the connections mature, the youngster must practice using them -- through physical and mental activity. If the brain remains relatively passive during childhood and/or adolescence, it will be much more difficult to develop these skills later when the brain is less flexible. [53]

Dr. Jerre Levy, biopsychologist at the University of Chicago and an internationally known authority on hemispheric development, believes that mental effort of all kinds is what firms up these connections.

I suspect that normal human brains are built to be challenged and that it is only in the face of an adequate challenge that normal bihemispheric brain operations are engaged. [54]

Dr. Levy insists that children need "a linguistic environment that is coordinated with the visual environment they're experiencing," not the "linguistically depleted" environment of TV. In other words, they need to pay attention to words as well as to pictures.

Dr. Levy feels that older children may actually be more affected by the low-level linguistic content of much television programming than little ones. "Furthermore," she added, "the main thing that worries me about TV is not even its intellectual level. To the extent that children commit time looking at TV, they're not spending time reading. When a child reads a novel, he has to self-create whole scenarios, he has to create images of who these people are, what their emotions are, what their tones of voice are, what the environment looks like, what the feeling of this environment is. These self-created scenarios are important, and television leaves no room for that creative process.

"I think brains are designed to meet cognitive challenges," she concluded. "It's just like muscles; if you don't exercise them they wither. If you don't exercise brains, they wither." [55]

POOR SCAFFOLDING FOR THE BRAIN'S EXECUTIVE

Equally troubling is the growing suspicion that the brain's executive centers may be compromised by too many hours in front of the tube. This concern was repeatedly expressed by neuropsychologists whom I informally polled at a recent conference, most of whom, incidentally, said they allow their children to watch [TV] -- but on a limited and selective basis.

"It's too simple to say TV makes kids 'right-brained,'" commented Dr. Sid Segalowitz, an authority on children's hemispheric development. "It's important that parents realize how complex the brain is. They hear all this stuff about stimulating their child's brain; it's important to realize that you can't stimulate just one isolated part of it. Brain function is a system; we need to get away from this right and left idea. When we look at slides of blood flow in the brain when kids are reading, we can see so many different areas lighting up at once. Good readers tend to use both left and right hemispheres, including the prefrontal systems."

Spending time with something that doesn't challenge their brains much could impinge on development of prefrontal executive functions, such as control of thinking, attention, and general planning skills, said Dr. Segalowitz. "The frontal lobes are late enough developing that they can definitely be affected by environmental variables, but we still don't know how much is programmable hardware, and how much is not." [56] Like several colleagues, he would like to initiate research to find out more about how environmental influences affect this mysterious -- and influential -- brain area.

As reviewed in Chapter 8, frontal-lobe development continues throughout childhood and adolescence. It is closely related to the vigilance (persistent attention) that seems to be particularly affected by TV viewing. Growth in these executive systems probably accounts for the dramatic shift usually seen in children's control over their own reasoning abilities between ages five and seven. [57] During this period they become much better able to understand and plan strategies for what they are learning, as well as for controlling their own behavior. Parents don't need to be reminded, however, that many "control functions" don't become dependable until much later! How television may affect this course of development is unknown, although we may safely assume that extensive viewing has some effects.

Prefrontal development enables higher-level learning. Conversely, thoughtful, mentally challenging reading, reflecting, planning, and problem-solving nourishes these neural circuits. It is possible to read words without much help from these higher-level control centers, but comprehension and application -- as well as motivation and persistence -- require their use. These endangered skills appear to be the ones most related to our national crisis in learning. How much can be blamed on a generalized willingness to let TV "scaffold" children's development?

CONCLUSION: VIDEO CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO BRAINS AND LEARNING

The overall effects of television viewing and other forms of video on the growing brain are poorly understood, but research strongly indicates that it has the potential to affect both the brain itself and related learning abilities. Abilities to sustain attention independently, stick to problems actively, listen intelligently, read with understanding, and use language effectively may be particularly at risk. No one knows how much exposure is necessary to make a difference. Likewise, no information is available about the overall effects on intelligence of large amounts of time taken from physical exercise, social or independent play, pleasure reading, sustained conversation, or roaming quietly about in one's own imagination.

The notion that television overdevelops the right hemisphere is giving way to the much greater possibility that it underdevelops several areas and/or the connections between them. Not only left-hemisphere language systems, but also higher-order organizational abilities, including the all-important control, motivation, and planning functions of the prefrontal lobes, may be in jeopardy for children who watch without expending much mental effort. All these functions may have sensitive periods when they are particularly susceptible to variations in stimulation, but it is difficult to determine which age periods are more critical than others or how much exposure is needed to cause physical effects.

The fact that reports from teachers so precisely mirror the "symptoms" of these same deficits should give us all pause. Surely, with the amount of time children in this country spend in front of the screen, we should demand better research on its effects. There must be a great untapped teaching potential there somewhere. Meanwhile, the best advice to parents seems to be the usual caveats:

• Place firm limits on television and video use; encourage children to plan ahead for favorite shows and games.
• Participate with children whenever possible.
• Talk with the child about television content, methods of audience manipulation, point of view, etc.
• If you want children to become readers, show them how to turn off the tube and pick up a book.
• Remember, what is pleasantly relaxing to your brain may not be good for theirs.
• Give substitute caregivers strict guidelines regarding TV and video use.
• Read the next chapter before you encourage preschoolers to watch Sesame Street.