So, rip rip rip, and 14 hours of work later, I had a giant list of bumps along the story road. How giant? Twenty pages of things that are broken in the story. Four pages listing all the times the characters’ hair color/height/name changes, their actions don’t match their motivations, and random new characters pop up without introduction or plan. Two pages listing things I like (!). And nine pages listing setting, history, and other facts I need to look up. Again, the most-common note was “add emotion”; this time second-most was “where ARE they?” There are a number of scenes that could be set in outer space for as much detail as I put in.

Next up, a week of research and setting up a story timeline that makes sense. And next weekend, another readthrough, this time looking for things promised (i.e. “gun on the wall in the first act”) that I didn’t follow through on.

This method (the numbered lists) is based on Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel online course.

How does school work, brain-wise? Do children teach themselves or is it something about the instruction that gets their brains firing and wiring faster? Last fall, a few hundred neuroscientists, teachers, and curriculum-makers met for a weekend to hash out what we know about learning and how we could use it to help every child succeed at school. One early answer: Play. 

The Aspen Brain Forum was sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, which has posted an extensive summary of the event as well as slides and audio from eighteen of the sessions. For an introductory taste of the event, though, try the 18-min podcast (which we sponsored). Science and the City’s Nadja Popovich talked with three of the presenters, who sketch the growing field and describe a few surprising results.  

Many of these results are connected to the cognitive properties of executive function, especially attention: inhibiting distraction, focusing on the correct aspect of a task, and maintaining focus. For example, Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia describes the “red-pencil technique” for children who are writing their letters or numbers the wrong way (mirrored). Asking them to remind themselves to stop before they have to write a “6″ and switch from their regular pencil to another one to write that number slows them down enough that they write the number correctly, a change that seems to last. Diamond also points out that learning programs that include social, emotional, and physical components (such as play) “are better for academic achievement and executive function” than those that focus solely on academics. “Addressing only the cognitive seems to be less beneficial,” she says.

On the subject of play, Daphne Bavalier of the University of Rochester offers tantalizing research into the benefits of often-denigrated video games. Studies done on undergraduate non-gamers who played games for the first time for a few dozen hours seem to show they have improved vision acuity and speed as well as attention. How might programmers tweak games to foster improvements that could last?

Bruce McCandliss of Vanderbilt University describes research that suggests that differences in learning abilities and styles may have a grounding in attention, too—or rather, what we focus our attention on. Brain scans of young people focusing on the beginnings and endings of spoken words differ in predictable ways from the scans of those who focus on the melody of the sentences, for example. Might “poor” readers be focusing on a less-helpful aspect of the language, perhaps enjoying the music of the language and missing its meaning? “Different learning styles may rely on different styles of attention,” he says, and might benefit from different methods of instruction.

Like most of neuroscience, questions are more plentiful than answers. We do know some things work better than others, though; Diamond cites the Montessori, Tools of the Mind, and Path curriculums; Jump Math also seems to be making mathematicians of entire classrooms, not just a lucky few, according to John Mighton (who was not on the podcast but did attend the meeting).

The main take-away? Everyone learns a little differently, so relax about it. As Diamond says, “stress impairs executive function.”

–Nicky Penttila

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

• write every day
• spend 2 hours or more every week marketing my work
• travel to Spain for research
• finish another print-worthy novel
• have something I wrote for sale (or bought) by November
• volunteer to judge or coordinate 3 writing contests
• continue to volunteer as WRW membership goddess
• buy a copy of all my friends’ debut books this year (3-D copies preferred)
• read 50 books
• keep a list of books I read this year (see right).

And you?

• spent more than 300 hours writing (not web-surfing or sitting, but writing)
• spent more than 120 hours doing volunteer work
• finished 1 print-worthy book (!)
• submitted my work to agents and editors, and got good critiques and notes
• wrote 1 good short story and started 2 others
• won NaNoWriMo!
• volunteered as a judge for 3 writing contests and coordinator for one
• volunteered as WRW membership goddess, including developing and implementing a new web-based registration method
• attended WRW’s retreat, the RT conference (first time), and RWA’s conference
• arranged to have my story edited by a really good editor
• read 54 books (see right) across many genres.

And you?

From the London Times, 7 January 1809, page 3

ACKERMANN’S Repository of Arts, &c. which has just appeared, has adopted a novelty, we are surprised not to have been long since thought of, that of making a periodical publication the vehicle to distribute patterns of different articles of British manufacture that unite fashion, elegance, and utility.

How Do You Get Involved in Neuroethics?
During a workshop at the annual meeting of the International Neuroethics Society, panelists advised ethical wannabes to just get started.

Sex (differences) and Brain Science
Is the study of sex differences gaining traction in neuroscience? It was the topic of the very first Social Issues Roundtable at the Society for Neuroscience, in 1983, and it was the topic again this year.

Generating Obesity
The obesity epidemic was the topic of the Public Advocacy Forum at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting on Wednesday, and it was nearly two hours of scary data with a little bit of hope.

New vocabulary

This is my sixth time attending (as a member of the press, not a brain expert), and I love to soak up the enthusiasm and cheerful argumentitiveness of these passionate folks. And boy, do I learn a lot. The event is organized by the people at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), whom we work with on many projects, especially Brain Awareness Week (BAW). On Saturday, we’ll be presenting during the Brain Awareness campaign meeting, at 3 pm in the Convention Center’s Room 151.

There is always a ton of new research at the conference; some of it is incremental or not-yet-ready-for-publication, but don’t be surprised if you see a lot of news stories on brain topics this weekend.

At the Dana Foundation blog, we’ll be reporting from the event over the next few weeks, but if you want to follow an up-to-the-minute feed hop onto Twitter: The official conference hashtag is #sfn11. Nature is planning a lot of coverage, starting at its blog Action Potential and via Google+. If you’re interested in specific topics, you might follow one of SfN’s official neurobloggers, who are focusing on various themes, from nervous-system disorders to history and teaching.

I attended one of the auxiliary events already, on Thursday and Friday, the annual meeting of the International Neuroethics Society. My story, “How do you get a job in neuroethics?” is up, at dana.org.

SUICIDE.—A beautiful young woman, who was recently the adored of a certain Marquis, and who has since been under the protection of a military officer, put a period to her existence at her apartments, a draper’s, in Oxford-street, on Sunday night, by taking a considerable portion of laudanum. Her last protector had dined and spent the day with her on Sunday, and after his departure, at 11 o’clock at night, the lady was found in tears, and much dejected. She was found dead in her bed at nine o’clock on Monday morning, and it was ascertained, that she had taken a tea-cup full of the poisionous liquid.

(The Times, 8 October 1808, p. 3)

Uh-oh. I feel another story coming on.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), the signature injury of the current U.S. wars, calls for the nation’s best “emergency medicine,” Kevin Kit Parker told a group of top scientists, medicine makers, and policy makers, this spring at the One Mind for Research conference in Boston.

“Certainly TBI, as it affects the force, is a national security issue, and it’s certainly an emergency issue.” Like the race to the moon and the Manhattan project, he said, TBI is an emergency science project with national security at stake and a need to move rapidly.

“You’ve got young NCOs [non-commissioned officers], young soldiers out there that have been blown up a dozen times, a dozen times they’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury, since 9/11. We have this growing cadre of our professional warriors that are out there, that are walking around, and the concern is, what does the future hold for them?”

The timelines of TBI damage range from nanoseconds to years. “The data now is pretty clear that TBI can potentiate a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease,” Parker said. “So the outlook for these young soldiers is kind of bleak right now.”

Parker, a professor at Harvard, has also served multiple tours in Afghanistan in the Army Reserve, tending the wounded immediately after impact and observing their recovery on base and back in the United States. The experiences led him to expand his research focus from the physics of the heart to the brain. “When people started trying to kill me with IED’s I thought I’d better get a piece of this,” he said.

His background also led to an unusual approach to the problem, or at least unusual for neuroscientists. “I’m an infantry officer in the reserve, and I’m not a physician, I’m a physicist, so I look at things in terms of scaling laws.” Interested in how mechanical energy (such as from blasts) affects neurons, he and the people in his lab decided to try to build physical models of blast injury from molecule to cell and from cell to tissue.

“We use tissue engineering as a tool, including blasting neurons,” he said. “What we found right away is that we can mimic some of the things that the neuropathologists are reporting that they’re seeing in patients.”

“Now that we’ve got all these models, we’re working on developing a systematic understanding of the mechanical forces required to injure these neurons, these vascular tissues, and understand the chemical cascades that are turned on by these mechanical forces.” If they understand these chemical cascades, they could start to identify which molecules along the cascade are the most vulnerable—and which might be easily reached by drugs and other therapies.

Part of emergency medicine is exploring many avenues simultaneously, Parker said. His theory is it’s diffused axonal injury that leads to damage from TBI, but researchers need to work on multiple hypotheses, to “flank the problem” with the outside-the-box ideas until someone finds some badly needed solutions.

One giant challenge: “We need to build a brain,” he said. “Everyone would benefit from having a brain in their [laboratory] dish to work on:” a 1 mm³ piece of brain that mimics the neural microenvironment, scalable so what people discover in the lab can be tested in drug-maker’s wide-assay studies. He’s working on it.

In addition, “we need to push the science as far forward [on the battlefield] as we possibly can,” he said. “It might be a diffusion tensor imager that we put downrange, it might be a biomarkers lab that we put downrange … so we can understand, as these soldiers come off the battlefield, what’s happening to them, rather than waiting 6 months, 12 months before they present at a VA emergency room.”

“The whole idea is that when these guys [medics] run up there to pull these broken kids out of this MRAP [armored vehicle], that there’s a whole team behind them supporting them,” he said. “If I run up there and this kid’s got a leg dangling off, I know how to apply a tourniquet to him. If I run up there and he’s got his bell rung, I got no way of treating this guy right now. And right now he’s at the genesis of these neurodegenerative diseases that might not appear for 20-30 years down the road.”

His remarks start just after minute 1 of this video. The slides he uses are especially useful in understanding the science.

The forum was held in Boston May 23–25 by the One Mind for Research campaign, whose goal is “to significantly reduce the U.S. burden of disability due to brain disorders.” The campaigners released a blueprint of research goals at the event: “A Ten-Year Plan for Neuroscience: From Molecules to Brain Health” (PDF). Videos of all the sessions are collected on the Science Network site.

The Science Network also did a wide-ranging interview with Parker, on work in the lab, his experience in Afghanistan, how he got started in science, and his passionate advocacy for his compatriots in the field. (22 min). It’s also well worth a listen.

–Nicky Penttila