Eide Neurolearning Blog

Why It's Hard to Listen to Two People Talking at One Time

2012-01-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon show us why it's hard for us to listen to two people talking at one time. In addition to listening to the individual messages, we have to use bilateral brain pathways to resolve conflicts in what we heard (or what we think we heard) and piece together information.

Developmentally, the need for bilateral brain coordination and interhemispheric pathways is plenty good reason for why some students (and nearly all young children) may have a harder time listening over background noise or focusing on a teacher's comments while a classmate is talking.

In the figure at left (see this study), see how the digit (number) recall of 6-9 year old children goes steadily down as background noise goes up.

There is an entire science of noisy classrooms - but briefly, background noise in occupied classrooms is significant (48-68 dB in one study) and it significantly affects classroom performance particularly for subjects like reading, spelling, attention, and behavior. And yes - it also affects teacher performance. Children with hearing loss or auditory processing disorders are affected more than their non-impaired peers.

Pattern Learning and the Brain

2012-01-16T00:05:00.000-08:00

From NY Times:

"For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws — then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter. Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against. Like the ballplayer who can “read” pitches early, or the chess master who “sees” the best move, they’ve developed a great eye.

Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest. Better yet, perceptual knowledge builds automatically."

This is like the Turkey and the Crow.

Expertise at pattern recognition is a very different brain-based process than expertise at rule-based learning or a motor skill. Patterns are more flexible and iterative than conventional rule-based processes, so as a result, it shouldn't be surprising that more and bilateral brain pathways are activated among pattern recognition experts, whereas fewer areas of brain activated in rule-based or motor skill (cognitive efficiency).

For example, fMRI studies of chess grandmasters and chess novices found that chess experts use twice the brain of novices when looking at chess piece positions.

But musicians activated less brain than non-musicians when performing a simple motor task.

For people who are very good at solving problems, the ideal situation is to be good at both, recognizing what pathways and resources to activated for rote and simple motor tasks in addition to being able to switch gears for bihemispheric brain work that recognized patterns, similarities, and differences.

Learning from Exceptions in the Brain

2011-12-12T00:05:00.000-08:00

There is a learning style that seems unmistakable in some - and it seems to involve learning from exceptions. These may be children who from a very young age seem to question rules and challenge assumptions. They're kids who if you try to tell them what to think, they may quickly answer, "Actually..."

This learning preference often goes hand-in-hand with novelty and inductive learning because discovering an exception means that you might have to rethink your rules and shuffle your categories. 'Exception' learners are often highly motivated by bizarre facts and incredible stories that might push the limits of what is known, what is done, or what might be possible.

Texas researchers now have shown that learning from exceptions comes from processes originating in the medial temporal lobes, an interesting area of the brain because it's also where episodic memory (memory for personally-experienced events or scenes) lives.

Learners who drive their episodic memory systems over rote (many dyslexics, for instance) prefer experiential learning, learning from exceptions, and reasoning back to simple principles.

The weakness of 'exception' learning is that it may cause one to doubt 'obvious' rules (over-interpreting multiple choice questions for instance) and create chaotic grade records (i.e. "I don't get it" (fail, fail, fail)" - "Oh, I get it." (success)). 'Exception' learners don't feel they understand something until they've had enough examples or data points. They need enough observations to see that a rule exists - but also enough exceptions to distinguish examples or conditions that don't fit with a rule.

The advantage of 'exception' thinking, though, is when you need to break the mold. If you need a paradigm shift or completely different perspective on a problem, go to the rule breakers.

Memory, Reward, and Dopamine

2011-11-28T00:05:00.000-08:00

Nice review of Dopamine and Adaptive Memory from TICS.

When Princeton student volunteers where told that they would receive a significance monetary reward for some pictures on a computer screen that would follow, their midbrain reward centers and medial temporal lobe became activated in anticipation of the pictures that they would see. Testing the next day showed that the rewarded pictures were better remembered and better associated with their associated context.

It's an interesting review because it ties together data involving episodic / autobiographical / personal memory, novelty, and generalization. In our dyslexia practice, we often see students with a very strong bias toward episodic memory - memory for events that happened at specific times and in specific places. Many of these students could meet diagnostic criteria for ADD or ADHD; at the same time, they may learn well with novelty and have gifts at "big picture" thinking (mentioned as "generalization" in the paper).

So how to we reconcile these results with anti-reward proponents?

Carol Dweck and Dan Pink have cautioned about perils of rewards, but the distinction may be tasks that particularly work well with rewards are those that have little intrinsic interest or motivation themselves.

For instance, if a child loves playing the piano, don't pay them to practice...just give them plenty of opportunity to play and enjoy their performances. If , however, piano practice for a new student is complete chore, then little rewards and games (novelty) may be that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down until they master enough that the enjoyment of playing is reward enough.

For the classroom, one implication is that for some students (those that heavily prefer episodic memory, for instance), engagement, novelty, and rewards may be educational necessities to maximize student achievement.

Problems and Perils of Praise
carrot picture

Happy Thanksgiving in the Brain

2011-11-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

We wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Gratitude and thanksgiving are whole brain activities that involve deep-seated emotional areas, areas associated with context-sensitive morality, and abstract conceptual understanding.

Thankfulness to God involves multisensory areas, imagery, and regions associated with feelings of justice, peace, happiness, and unconditional love.

Our family has very much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving - bless you all!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving week.

Gratitude, Neural basis of human social values fmri pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Celebrating Thanksgiving with all your mind
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Thanksgiving, Charity, and the Brain

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

Complex Development of Moral Sensitivity and Empathy - fMRI

2011-11-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

From the Decety lab:

"Moral reasoning involves a complex integration between affective and cognitive processes that gradually changes with age and can be viewed in dynamic transaction across the course of ontogenesis. The ﬁndings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment."

Children as young as 6 months seem to preferentially interact with people who help and altruistic behavior can be seen in early childhood, but developmental steps, biological underpinnings, and individual variations are not well understood.

This study (age 4 to 37 years) provides insight into the complicated brain dance of perception, emotional response, and empathetic concern when viewing unintentional and intentional hurtful acts. All age groups reported feeling sad and upset when viewing intentional harm and harm directed toward people vs. objects. Emotional responses were similar in young children as adults, but amygdala activation was greater - the adults were better able to turn down amgydala activation compared to younger children. What being older also seemed to help with was distinguishing accidental from intentional harm (children tended to view all harmers as 'malevolent').

The study made us think of children (like those with sensory processing disorders) who struggled with empathetic behaviors although their emotional reactions and mirroring seemed normal. The perceptual side of empathy was intact, but the intensity of emotion reactions and cognitive decision making immature. On the flipside, other children might reason well about empathy, but have blunted emotional responses. The behaviors could look the same, but causes and interventions would be completely different.

Brooding Perfectionism -

2011-11-06T19:26:00.000-08:00

We recently came across the topic of Brooding Perfectionism.
There are different types of perfectionism (e.g. failure to live up to one's idealized standards or failure to live up to idealized others' standards), but brooding perfectionism adds the element of rumination, which Olson and Kwan define as "a maladaptive style that is defined as the unintentional process of repetitively and passively thinking about one's negative emotions and focusing on depressive symptoms and their meaning." It can be a difficult vicious cycle because reflection and seeking to understand both seem to be good things - but what's striking is how negative an effect rumination has on general thinking (it swamps working memory), problem solving, and resilient behaviors.

Excerpt (sorry the whole article is not available free access - but it can be rented with a free DeepDyve.com trial): "A ruminative response style has also been shown to prolong depressive episodes. Rumination leads to irrational, negative interpretations of life events. In addition, focus on negative thoughts leads to an absence of potential efforts to ameliorate the consequences of a negative life event. The combination of a depressed mood and rumination may activate doubt regarding one's problem solving abilities, leading the individual to give up hope on solving problems. Individuals may also believe that their problems are less controllable than they actually are. These individuals are unsuccessful in efforts to diminish the problems, focusing more on their emotions than on productive behaviors that could potentially correct the problems."

What the researchers found is that a ruminative tendency predicted whether depression would be severe in the setting of setbacks. High brooding perfectionists were not more depressed as a group when they hadn't experienced serious negative life experiences. But they were very vulnerable to depression when negative events occurred.

For another great read, check out Rethinking Rumination. Interesting tidbits covered included the difference between worry and rumination, the difficulty that ruminators have with task-switching, the paralyzing effect of rumination (more think than do), and rumination's effects on attention and memory bias. It turns out ruminators are more likely to generalize rather than specifically remember from life events (autobiographical memory). Fortunately, the paper also includes interventions to overcome rumination and there are papers like this Seligman paper have specific suggestions to reduce destructive rumination and increase happiness. For highly intellectual persons, it can be freeing notion learning more about this dark side of reflection and perfectionism.

For a pretty accessible self-help book, check out The Power of Now.

Thinker Pic - Flickr Dan MacKay

Real World vs. Simple Problem Solving

2011-10-24T00:05:00.000-07:00

In the Neural Basis of Thinking, Vinod Goel reflects on the puzzle of a brain-injured architect. Although after his injury (R prefrontal cortex), he was still found to have a superior IQ (128 on the WAIS-R), he found himself unable to resume his work as an architect and live independently in the world.

What is it that common psychometric (and many school tests) miss, and how are they different from surviving and thriving in the real world?

Goel found that although the architect could manage the well structured problems of IQ tests well, he was unprepared for a more "real world task" that required him to design a new lab space. When his performance was matched to an architect of similar training and age, he had trouble transitioning from the problem scoping to problem planning stage, he started planning too late in the exercise, and he had trouble tying together earlier bits of information into a coherent plan to solve the task. He never made it to the detail stage.

What Goel suggests is that: "the right PFC (prefrontal cortex) plays a selective but critical role in situations where the problem space (1) is very broad and poorly constrained, (2) contains misleading / conflicting information, or (3) contains insufficient information to determine the conclusion. These are all hallmarks of real-world problems." Many have dismissed the right PFC to almost a supporting role to the left PFC, but in other testing paradigms that would seem closer models of real world problem solving (e.g. requiring hypothesis generation or trial-and-error learning), the right PFC again leaps to prominence.

Goel goes on to speculate: "As standard neuropsychological test batteries consist only of well-structured problems, while real-world problems have both ill-structured and well-structured components (the former preceding the latter), patients may perform well in the lab, but stumble in the real world.

If this is a genuine double dissociation (and if success in the world consists of primarily dealing with the lack of structure), it should be possible to find individuals exhibiting the reverse pattern; ie being very successful in the world by underperforming in the neuropsychology laboratory...Certainly, there are anecdotal stories of individuals who have amassed great power and wealth but would turn in a mediocre performance on IQ tests..."

The idea seems compelling. A host of adults who struggled in school but thrived in real life come to mind (this is not an uncommon profile for dyslexics, for instance).

If we aren't regularly presenting our students with poorly structured problems or open-ended challenges from the real world, maybe we need to change.

High Fluid Intelligence, Gestures, and Simulation

2011-10-17T23:48:00.000-07:00

In an interesting study, German researchers found that increased hand gestures of 11th graders predict their correct solving of a chessboard visual analogy problem as well as predicting increased cortical thickness and higher fluid intelligence.

"...all the students talked about the same things in their explanations, but almost no one actually mentioned anything about rotation. But by looking at their hands – not by listening to what they were saying – we could distinguish between people with high and average fluid intelligence. We think that these hand gestures mimicked the strategy that the students used in solving the task. That is, they rotated the patterns in their imagination, just as they did with their hands. This suggests that individuals with high fluid intelligence engage more in simulation when imagining the problem than those with average fluid intelligence.

In fact, when we made Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans of the students’ brains, we found that the cortical tissue in several areas of the brain was thicker among those students with high fluid intelligence who gestured more than among those with average fluid intelligence.

Our results indicate that the cortical thickness of those brain regions is related to both high fluid intelligence and the production of gestures. We do not know with certainty yet, but this result suggests that some brain areas may be more developed for the students with high fluid intelligence, possibly like a muscle that grows larger when it is trained.

Recent theories about the processes of thought emphasize the role of so-called action simulation. Evidence from other brain imaging experiments show that some of the same areas of the brain are activated when people only imagine performing an action as when they actually perform it. One theory proposes that these strongly activated simulated actions are manifested as gestures.

We do not know yet whether gesturing facilitates the development of fluid intelligence or whether it is a by-product. But we do know that children who are asked to gesture in certain ways while learning new tasks learn better than children who are asked not to gesture. Considering that gesturing benefits children while learning, it is possible that gesturing plays a role in the development of fluid intelligence, perhaps by simulating action. If this proves to be true, children might be able to literally give themselves a hand in their own development by gesturing more."

It's interesting to think that teaching children to problem solve certain types of problems should involve strategies that take into account that fact that one is trying to train the imagery of the students. Just verbally saying back the steps of a problem or even watching an explanation won't internalize the imagery. To really 'get' certain problems, we have to enter into the simulation and perceive the question and solution in a bodily way.

http://atomiumculture.eu/node/303

ADHD, Creativity, and Reduced Inhibition

2011-10-10T00:05:00.000-07:00

"ADHD may have negative consequences for academic achievement, employment performance, and social relationships. However one positive consequence of ADHD may be enhanced creativity..."

Using the Remote Associates Test as a measure of convergent thinking and Unusual Uses Task as a measure of divergent thinking, White and Shah found that college students with ADHD scored higher than their non-ADHD counterparts on the Unusual Uses Task (fluency, flexibility, and originality), but lower than the control group on the Remote Associates Test.

The authors conclude:

"...the current findings have exciting implications for non-laboratory contexts. Research suggests that different types of creative thinkers may excel at different types of problem-solving (e.g., Finke, 1996; Zhang, 2002). For example, Finke (1996) describes ‘‘chaotic thinkers’’ as individuals who have an unstructured, spontaneous cognitive style (‘‘chaotic cognition’’) that tends to result in original creative products (Finke, 1996). This divergent thinking style may facilitate insight thinking, or ‘‘thinking outside the box’’.... to what extent are the negative consequences of ADHD balanced by some possible benefits? Rather than focusing exclusively on the limitations associated with ADHD, perhaps future studies will address the potential benefits of the uninhibited ADHD mind."

Creativity in Adults with ADHD

Stimulating Creativity and the Brain

2011-10-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

In the alternative uses task, test subjects are asked to think of alternative uses of everyday objects like "tin" and "umbrella". If we think of unusual uses rather than typical characteristics, the most striking changes are deactivation of the right parietal lobe and activation of the supramarginal gyrus.

Interestingly, the deactivated area in the right parietal lobe is a similar area deactivated in musical improvisation (Berkowitz and Ansari, 2010) and the left supramarginal gyrus has been implicated in motor planning imagery (praxis) and action-based metaphors such as "reach for the stars" (Tell Tale Brain, VS Ramachandran).

Two additional observations were made from the study - first, that allowing people to incubate about their answers increased the likelihood that they'd have more original answers, and being exposed to some of the creative answers of others stimulated their creativity even more (p > 0.001).

For more on the the benefits of group brainstorming read here. Negative effects on creativity can occur because of "group think" and "social loafing", but positive effects result too because the triggering of new associations, addition of new ideas about the nature of the problem (problem scoping), and social motivational factors to generate more possibilities.

So when we give a student an assignment, how much time do we spend brainstorming with others about different possible ways to answer a question or write a report? If the work seems less creative than we would like, maybe we should think more about 'priming the pump.'

Enhancing Creativity with Cognitive Stimulation pdf

What Educators Can Learn from Madison Avenue -Bad Design Kills

2011-09-19T00:05:00.000-07:00

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote about the educational benefits of "ugly fonts", but though the research is a good, it's not really the case that they're ugly. What they are is novel. And novelty is usually a good thing when you have something you want remembered.

In this Princeton study, 18-40 year old test subjects were allowed to read short descriptions of aliens either in a "disfluent font" like Comic Sans or Bodoni (top right) or a "fluent font" like Arial (bottom right).

After a 15 minute delay, participants were able to recall 14% more information if it was presented in the disfluent.

Now Madison Avenue and even the US government have known for some time that font shape, size, and color make a difference in terms of what one notices and remembers, Isn't it time for teachers to catch on, especially if they want their students to remember better?

A future study of course should be with younger students and we would hope dyslexics. Many dyslexics and people working with dyslexic students have noticed that font and color can affect both readability and memorability for text.

Young children learning to read are often confronted with early readers with homogeneously looking words in chubby fonts like the one above from Starfall. If the words are closer together, it may be almost unreadable.

Not ever child has problems, but in our experience, those with limited visual spans do - so much in fact that they may see an increase in their reading abilities if switched to different fonts or even more challenging early readers in which word length vary. If these kids are older late readers who have a strong listened vocabulary, then they may quickly progress with books like Geronimo Stilton (above) that have fairly challenging vocabulary, but visual cues and elaborated fonts to aid the decoding process.

Hopefully the publishers of educational curriculum will catch up to all this. Visual perception principles are not just for wonky science aficionados. They're what we need for the classroom.

Verbal vs. Visual Problem Solving in the Brain

2011-09-12T00:05:00.000-07:00

In this research of fMRI problem solving from researchers in Indiana, adoption of a verbal / algebraic vs. visual strategy had similar patterns of activation in brain networks, but the visual strategy was less demanding on working memory, and visual strategies were preferred more often from students who had working memory limitations.

Which strategy would you choose?

The month after April is the month before my favorite month. What is my favorite month?

It's also interesting that individuals with more limited working memory tended to have a reduced reading span (mild dyslexia?).

One question that comes to mind is whether most algebra or logic teachers would teach verbally or algebraically rather than visually. And if so, is that why students with more limited working memories or those with a bias toward spatial problem solving may be being left behind?

Studies such as these are very basic, but surprisingly there are still some educational pedagogues who suggest that teachers should not tailor instruction to different types of learners.

Stories, Empathy, and the Brain

2011-09-05T00:05:00.000-07:00

Want an empathy workout for your brain? Read a book!

At right the blue shows activation patterns associated with emotional comprehension (blue) and perspective taking (yellow) when reading a story.

It turns out, when we read an emotional work, we activate a complex mentalizing network in order to think about the mental state of another person. Imagining a person in a different place takes more brain power (reading slows) and also activates the spatial network necessary to set up a scene in the brain.

No wonder reading complex novels with all their differing personalities, motives, and scenarios can be an exhausting process.

If we want to train children up in empathy, then stories are a great way to do it. Seeing the complexity of the pathways required for empathizing should help us understand why people with sensory processing challenges have such difficulty projecting themselves into stories and empathizing with different story characters. But this spatial network can be trained and research suggests empathy can also improve.

From Harvard's Mass General, 8 weeks of a meditation-mindfulness stress reduction course showed changes in cortical networks like this story network associated with empathy, sense of self, and stress.

Curiosity, Doing, and Creative Success

2011-08-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks Brain Pickings for this talk by filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman on Creativity, Rigor, and Learning as You Go.

"The rigor came from the curiosity..."

There's a good take-home point listening to Zuckerman talk about his Wisdom Project, a project to gather 'senior' creatives from around the world to share their thoughts on wisdom and lessons learned.

Good points are made about curiosity and openness to experience, flexibility and tolerance of imperfection, and the importance of follow-through.

Andrew Zuckerman from 99% on Vimeo.

For more on curiosity, check out Curiosity and Success Curiosty and Creativity and Curiosity and the Mind

The Dyslexic Advantage is Out! - Dyslexic Inventor James Russell

2011-08-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

It's here! Our book, The Dyslexic Advantage is out!

In Dyslexic Advantage, we weave together stories from incredibly talented people with dyslexia (writers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and more) with some of the latest neuroscience research about dyslexic processing, insight-based thinking, visualization, and scene construction.

Listening more different people's experiences with dyslexia tells us much more than simplistic categories of learning disabilities.

Check out this brief excerpt from our interview with James Russell, inventor of the compact disc.

Us: Were you a math kid?

James Russell: No...it was something of a struggle to learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and that sort of thing. I devised various schemes –particularly multiplication to figure out what the answer was without having to memorize the times'...

Us: I would’ve thought that physics and electronics is rules…it’s not?

James Russell: No, it’s visual

Barbara Russell: In Trigonometry – you have to memorize all the trig functions – Jim found it easier to derive them each time rather than memorize them.

Us: How is it visual?

James Russell: If you’re talking about circuits, the electrons are going this way (gesturing), then there’s resistance (gesturing) and the storage capacitors (more gesturing) and the Philip capacitors.

Us: So a lot of movement, right?

James Russell: Yep. Sure.

Eides: Now there was a story about Tesla where he had said if he were building a machine, he could imagine it in his mind so clearly that he could manipulate it and tweak it to see what would happen. He said he could perform experiments in his mind. Do you have something like that?

James Russell: Sure.

Eides: How detailed are the visual images. Can you see them like pictures or do you have a sense of relationship and their kinetic properties. Are they color images?

James Russell: That’s a tough one to answer. That depends on what level. If we’re talking about building something like a chair, then it’s all detail visual. I’ve got a 2 by 4 and put another 2 by 4. I’ll nail it this way and so forth. If it’s something more technical, then there are still images, but they aren’t exact images. It's an image type-thought. It's not a specific image.

It's interviews like that that should make us pause to ask how much we really know when we say we understand dyslexia or different thinking or problem solving styles for that matter. James Russell was by his own admission an "average" student in school, but there were definite glimmers of his ingenuity and talent at a very young age.

We hope that The Dyslexic Advantage is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an understanding of the breadth and depth of dyslexic gifts and talents. Dyslexia is thought to be as common as 1 in 10 people - if that is so, that's a lot of diamonds in our midst.

photo James Russell

Math in the Brain: Change from 2nd to 3rd Grade

2011-08-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

From Stanford comes this study looking at the difference in brain fMRI patterns of 2nd vs. 3rd graders working on arithmetic.

It turns out a lot of differences can be seen in just one year - and accompanying greater accuracy and quicker reaction times, are changes in several brain areas that suggest that math is done by large scale brain networks interacting with each other rather than a single location for 'math'.

As the developmental steps for problem solving become clearer, expect more developmental guidelines guiding curriculum. Working memory (visual as well as verbal) also takes quite a while to develop (see here). Being able to know where a student is starting from the cognitive standpoint makes the educational process all that much easier.

Working Memory, Math Performance, and Math Anxiety

For math tips, check out some of Marilyn Burn's articles here.

Head for the HIlls - Cities Bad for Your Mental Health

2011-07-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

From the journal Nature, German researchers found that city dwellers showed much more social stress (measured by amygdala activation in response to an examiner scolding them as they were doing math problems) than country folk.

Lead researcher Meyer-Lindenberg was looking to tease out factors that contribute to a 2-fold higher incidence of schizophrenia in city vs. rural dwellers.

The study is a good reminder the importance of environment on psychological health - it seems obvious, when for instance a child is having a psychological crisis in an environment of significant stress, it's surprising how often environmental changes (like take them out of school or a bullying situation?) take a back seat.

Studies like this are helpful. Of course, it shouldn't take an fMRI study to tell us that put-downs and city stress are bad for our brains. It should also be common sense.

Wired: Cities Change Your Brain for Worse

The Nature article is free with registration.

Why It's Hard For Kids to Stand Still

2011-07-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

Researchers from France were surprised to find that children ages 7-10 had a harder time standing still when compared to older children (12-15) or adults due to immaturity in their sensory readjustment systems (proprioceptive weighting).

The visual system also contributes significantly to postural balance, so don't be surprised if kids with visual problems have problem standing (or sitting) still too.

Hmm. Makes you think about what we're expecting of young kids and when educational or behavioral expectations will catch up to developmental science.

Photo : rocket ship from Flickr

Great Fathers

2011-06-19T07:46:00.000-07:00

"[My father] advised me to sit every few months in my reading chair for an entire evening, close my eyes and try to think of new problems to solve. I took his advice very seriously and have been glad ever since that he did." Walter Alvarez, professor Earth and Planetary Sciences, son of Nobel prize winning physicist Luiz Alvarez

"Although Sklodowski would never forgive himself for losing the family savings in a bad investment, the children honored him for nurturing them emotionally and intellectually. On Saturday nights he read classics of literature to Maria and her siblings. He also exposed them to the scientific apparatus he had once used in teaching physics but now kept at home, since the Russian authorities had eliminated laboratory instruction from the Polish curriculum." - about dual Nobelist Marie Curie's father

Marie Curie also said "“I easily learned mathematics and physics, as far as these sciences were taken in consideration in the school. I found in this ready help from my father, who loved science...."

"I often wonder at the strength and courage my father had in taking me out of the traditional school situation and providing me with these extraordinary learning experieces. I am certain he established the positive direction of my life that otherwise, given my native hyperactivity, could have been confused and catastropic. I trace who I am and the direction of my development to those years of growing up in our house on the dunes, propelled especially by an internal spark tenderly kept alive and glowing by my father." - Ansel Adams

Happy Father's Day.

http://www.aip.org/history/curie/polgirl1.htm
http://www.fas.org/rlg/alvarez.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/ansel/peopleevents/p_aadams.html

The Turkey and the Crow - The Tension Between Expertise and Creativity

2011-06-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

Although we train students toward expertise and mastery, a tension seems to exist between cognitive efficiency and automaticity representing expertise, and divergent problem solving and innovation.

Once we started looking for the turkey-crow split, the more we started seeing it everywhere.

Please share your thoughts, comments, and criticisms, and share this video with your friends if you find it helpful. Education would really be much better if it recognized how fundamentally different turkey- and crow-biased thinkers approach learning. It wouldn't hurt either for more teachers, parents, professionals, and really everybody else came to appreciate the remarkable talents of the crow.

A Jolt of Insight

2011-06-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

"It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover." - Henri Poincare

Intuition has tremendous allure because it's thought to hold the key to unexpected discoveries, big picture insights, and paradigm shifts that can create or break whole disciplines. Because intuition is a less conscious process than logic or deductive thinking, it is also mysterious and unpredictable.

We've written about the right hemisphere's role in insight before, but Australian researchers have now find that giving an electrical jolt to the right anterior temporal lobe while suppressing the left improved problem solving by insight.

Excerpt:

"60 healthy right-handed participants were asked to take an insight problem solving task while receiving transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the anterior temporal lobes (ATL). Only 20% of participants solved an insight problem with sham stimulation (control), whereas 3 times as many participants did so (p = 0.011) with cathodal stimulation (decreased excitability) of the left ATL together with anodal stimulation (increased excitability) of the right ATL. We found hemispheric differences in that a stimulation montage involving the opposite polarities did not facilitate performance. Our findings are consistent with the theory that inhibition to the left ATL can lead to a cognitive style that is less influenced by mental templates and that the right ATL may be associated with insight or novel meaning."

This pattern is very close to the Miller and Hunt theory recently retold in Eureka Hunt :

The prefrontal cortex "is responsible not only for focussing on the task at hand but for figuring out what other areas need to be engaged in order to solve a problem. One implication of this is that if we’re trying to solve a verbal puzzle the prefrontal cortex will selectively activate

the specific brain areas involved with verbal processing. If it decides to turn on parts of the right hemisphere, then we might end up with an insight; if it decides to restrict its search to the left hemisphere, we’ll probably arrive at a solution incrementally or not at all."

Don't sign up for electrical stimulation right away though. There are other ways. Though insight-based thinking may not be a fully conscious process, we do know many situations that favor or disfavor insight. Sensory overload (including visual details) and verbal explanation can impair insight, as can stress and involvement in competing cognitively demanding tasks. To favor insight, one needs to do the reverse - remove one's self from visual or other sensory overload, avoid talking and active thinking - in other words, RELAX. Avid readers of the biographies of famous discovers know that many of the most famous breakthrough insights in history have occurred after men and women had labored hard and unsuccessfully on a problem, then took a nap, travelled, took a shower, or went on a walk.

From Poincare, who has many wonderful retellings of how he arrived at new mathematical ideas:

"I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions apparently without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with my preceding researches. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry...Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable..."

Insight - Easy and Hard Problem Solving

Why Daydreamers May Become Visionaries

2011-05-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

Need a whole brain workout? Try daydreaming and imagining solving in the future.

In this nifty research from Harvard, researchers found that college volunteers imagining future scenarios and solving problems there activated both the default network (also know as the "daydreaming network") and executive function brain regions. So it's daydreaming with a purpose.

The default or daydreaming network includes multiple bilateral brain areas that are turned down when external attention switches on.

May that's why many visionary personalities are often recalled as daydreamers in their childhood (and adulthood too if the truth be known) ...Maybe they were building better visionary brains in their youths while other more externally attentive children weren't. Wouldn't it be a pity if we don't give children time to boost their default networks?

One famous daydreamer in history was Isaac Newton: "Growing up Isaac barely maintained average grades and often lacked attention in school. Villagers looked upon his daydreaming, habits of reading for hours at a time, and keeping records of his interests as mere eccentricity.."

Isaac Newton also had the dubious honor of losing a horse that he was leading because he had been reading a book at the same time...

Solving Future Problems - Default Network, Executive Function, and Mental Simulations
Daydreaming Brain
Isaac Newton

Mathematical Minds

2011-05-23T00:02:00.000-07:00

"Most mathematicians did not just take up math as a "job"...(most) get more pleasure out of mathematics than almost any other activity. And they often discovered this pleasure when they were young..."

While most people would agree that "math people" are not like "non-math people", it's not always easy for non-mathematical minds to recognize (and appropriately nurture) mathematical ones. The reasons for this are several - mathematical kids are often independent and internally-driven problem solvers who may or may not excel in the standard math tasks of the elementary school classroom (if he's such a math kid, how come he's getting C's on his timed drills?...) Many students with extreme talents in math may also be relatively verbal-poor, so are less obviously the "smart" children in class. Also they may be reluctant to show what they know or what they are interested in to relative strangers, and may have difficulty explaining how they arrived at answers. Many mathematical minds are dyslexic or twice exceptional in another areas, too, complicating their identification with standardized tests or screening tools.

Numbers Kids The numbers kids are perhaps the easiest to recognize - and they often come from families where one or both parents have a special affinity to mathematics (engineers, computer science, academics). It may start out with children interested in patterns and facts within mathematics (divisibility rules, cube roots, etc.), card and other games, recreational math topics (Fibonacci sequence, fractals, probability, solving problems for 'fun') or mathematics in the world of adults (e.g. Philip Davis' cousin who let him be bookkeeper at the age of 7, keeping track of a race horse's handicap and winnings).

Tinkering Kids Tinkering kids tend to enjoy conceptual science books, building and unbuilding (gears, taking apart ball point pens and toys, clocks, cameras, origami etc.), computer-related activities, projects (completed and incomplete), and beautiful and unbeautiful design.

By temperament, strong math minds will tend to be introverted and have high focus and task persistence for activities of intrinsic interest. This may mean they are difficult to direct in the traditional or even non-traditional classroom (prefer studying lines of own interest), and they may be benefited particularly by mentors (often relatives or math teachers at higher levels of education) willing to discuss topics, ideas, and problems far in advance of their years.

Silverman and Feldman have distinguished engineering / math-gifted individuals into sensor (likes facts, data, experimentation) and intuitor (prefers principles and theories) groups. Both were capable of becoming "fine engineers", but sensors with less direct success in traditional academics.

Recently, some investigators have begun to look at brain-related differences in mathematically-gifted students (to our knowledge this has not been done in professional mathematicians, engineers, physicists); in his study of mathematically-gifted adolescents, Michael O'Boyle has found that superior mathematics performance was correlated with increased bihemispheric activation (vs. unilateral activation) for mathematics tasks, enhanced involvement of the right hemisphere for information (including linguistic) processing, and strong prefrontal cortex activation. As seen in the figure above, math-gifted adolescents performing mental rotation tasks activate much more brain bilaterally than average math-performing peers.

The optimal educational pathways for young math thinkers may also vary widely. Some thrive with subject acceleration, while others plenty of free time to explore topics of personal interest - whether conceptual or technical.

Perhaps the most common feature seen in young mathematical minds is their interest is solving problems. If you have a young mathematical mind in your house and he or she hasn't seen the PBS special on Fermat's Last Theorem, check it out.It's great - sort of what Race for the Double Helix is to budding scientists. The PBS video on Fermat's Last Theorem (Youtube.com)

From Andrew Wiles:

" I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem—Fermat's Last Theorem. This problem had been unsolved by mathematicians for 300 years. It looked so simple, and yet all the great mathematicians in history couldn't solve it. Here was a problem, that I, a ten year old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it."

Learning Styles in Engineering Students
Discovering Mathematical Talent
Cognitive Profiles of Mathematical Precocity
Interhemispheric Interaction in Mathematically Gifted Adolescents pdf
Developing Mathematical talent
Parental roles of mathematically gifted students pdf
Aha Moments in Math
Riemann Hypothesis
Fermat's Last Theorem
Autism occurs more often in the families of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians pdf
Education of a Mathematician