The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.

Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.

“We’re seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills,” Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email.”

In his newly released fourth book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, Small looks at how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.

Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, said the brain was very sensitive to the changes in the environment such as those brought by technology.

He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners.

“The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others,” said Small.

“We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution.”

Small said this multi-tasking could cause problems.

He said the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls “digital natives,” are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.

“There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language,” he said.

“But you can take steps to address this. It means taking time to cut back on technology, like having a family dinner, to find a balance. It is important to understand how technology is affecting our lives and our brains and take control of it.”

Source: Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE49Q34A20081027?sp=true

Dear Dr. Fournier: I just came from a school council meeting where parents were furious because of low achievement test scores. These are the same people that put stickers on their cars saying their child is an A student. How can you love your child’s school one day and hate it the next? When they give our children good grades, they’re great, but when they flunk standardized tests, our schools are bad?

Grades and achievement tests are both important. A law school student might have graduated with top honors and even been the editor of his school’s law review but will not be able to practice law until he passes the state bar exam. The challenge lies in the fact that children must do well from day to day in the classroom yet they must be able to pass tests made by others from outside your child’s school in order to be deemed a success.

Neither of these accomplishments guarantees your child success as an adult because school systems and standardized test makers are operating on the 1940s structure of education in this country, which was designed for the industrial era.

Your children must learn skills that are not being taught in schools.

WHAT TO DO

Harper’s magazine reports in the article “Figuratively Speaking” by John MacIntyre that 77 percent of parents of school-aged youth say they are satisfied with their children’s education. If this many people are happy, why do politicians and international studies indicate that our schools are so far below world standards? Obviously not everyone is happy. The same report says that the number decreases when adults in this country are asked the same question.

Only 44 percent of this group is all right with primary and secondary education. That means 56 percent does not believe our school systems are producing well-educated young adults. Of course these are many of the people that are supposed to employ our kids when they are older, so we have to admit that their opinion counts.

Strong American Schools chaired by former Colorado Governor Roy Romer found in 2004 that 33 percent of this country’s high school graduates needed remedial courses in college. Even though they had the grades to get into college and may have passed the SAT or ACT, they did not have the elementary/high school skills to do college work!

Furthermore, 29 percent of all students in four-year colleges and 43 percent of those in junior colleges needed remedial courses. Every one of those remedial students took courses in high school, passed those courses but learned close to nothing.

Taxpayers are paying billions a year to educate our children while college tuitions are increasing in part because colleges have to provide reeducation services — that is they have to teach high school (and sometimes elementary school) all over again.

The bottom line is that schools in our country are so busy teaching and trying to prove that they have taught by raising achievement scores that no one is watching the store. Schools are for children to learn.

Do not let your child go to bed celebrating an A unless he can prove to you that they still know what was on that test one month after they received the grade.

The system is fighting the wrong battle and losing the war.

Focus your energy on making sure your child has learned and let the bureaucrats and “happy with their school” parents knock themselves out losing the war and their children’s future, as well. (…)

Source: Henderson Gleaner, KY
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2008/oct/28/parents-should-focus-on-learning-more-than-on/

As a girl, author Peg Tyre didn’t like recess.

But as a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for Newsweek and CNN, Tyre noticed a trend: As schools across the country cut recess, music and other subjects not required by state tests, the number of students taking medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder went up.

“The American Medical Association tells us that 3 to 5 percent of Americans have ADHD,” said Tyre, who spoke at Book Passage in Corte Madera Tuesday and will appear at Redwood High School in Larkspur Thursday night. “Yet the Centers for Disease Control tell us that 14 percent of boys younger than 15 are diagnosed with the condition. I worry about why we’re medicating all these children.”

In her new book, The Trouble With Boys, Tyre argues that the changes schools have made during the past two decades - driven by a focus on standardized test scores - have created a huge disadvantage for boys.

“It used to be that boys did well in math and science, and girls did well in reading and writing,” Tyre said. “But in the last 20 years, girls have caught up in math and science, while boys have been taking a whipping in reading and have fallen behind in writing - at the same time that the whole curriculum has become literacy-based.”

In Marin, seventh-grade girls scored an average of 6 percentage points higher in English and 1 point lower in math on the 2008 California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) exam, according to the state Department of Education. Eleventh-grade girls scored 6 percentage points higher in English and 2 points higher in math on the state’s high school exit exam test for 2008.

Statewide, the gender gap is even greater, with seventh-grade girls scoring 10 percentage points higher on the English portion of the STAR and 10th-grade girls scoring 8 points higher in English on the exit exam.

The problem, Tyre argues, isn’t that boys are less intelligent or capable than girls. It’s that the two genders reach mental and emotional maturity at different ages, she said, and that schools increasingly reward skills like organization and neatness over innovation and risk-taking.

“Girls are completely mature at age 15 to 16, while boys are not there until they’re 25,” said Tyre, basing her argument on neurological studies of adolescent brain scans.

Virginia Dunn nodded in agreement.

“She’s right about the developmental pace,” said Dunn, a retired teacher who works as a reading intervention tutor and family therapist in San Rafael. “I used to teach high school, and around junior year, it was as though something magically happened, and boys began to catch up.”

At a time when success in school can determine so many aspects of people’s lives - where they work, where they live and even when they can retire - the evidence suggests the deck is stacked against boys, Tyre said.

Boys are expelled from preschool at a rate five times that of girls and are twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder or a learning disability, she said. Students in the lowest-performing group at each school tend overwhelmingly to be boys, whether the school is a wealthy private institution or an impoverished neighborhood school.

“Boys learn early on that school is a game they can’t win, and so they decide they don’t want to play,” Tyre said.

Educators have addressed gender as an element of the “achievement gap” between successful and struggling students. Yet county Director of Alternative Education Lisa Schwartz noted that every student falls into a variety of groups, and that each student needs to be treated as an individual.

“Boys probably do better in a more active learning environment,” Schwartz said. “But we need to be paying attention to each individual child. Boys may need a more active, problem-solving curriculum; gifted and talented students need the opportunity to stretch themselves; our English language learners need intensive support to develop their English language skills. We need to focus on a variety of strategies to help kids succeed better in order to be doing our job.”

Tyre doesn’t assign blame to parents, teachers or even distractions like television or video games. Instead, she says parents and teachers need to work together, armed with data, to find ways to make the educational experience better for both genders.

“I grew up with teachers who told me, ‘You don’t have to be a secretary. You can be a lawyer. You don’t have to be a stewardess; you can be pilot.’ That changed the world for girls. They can apply that same attitude to boys.”

Source: Marin Independent-Journal, CA
http://www.marinij.com/ci_10787120?source=most_viewed

Success in school depends upon both teacher and parental involvement (parents being the most important part of the equation). I am not a professional teacher; however, as a professional librarian, I have spent the last several years teaching parents during storytimes at the public library and also at community outreach classes (in medical clinic waiting rooms, etc.) the importance of their roles in their child’s education and success in life.

Most of a child’s brain development takes place during the first three years of life.Once the brain is “wired” or “not wired” during early childhood, it can be very difficult for a child to catch up in school. Whenever I talk to teachers and ask them their take on the situation, the comment I most often receive is, “If I could only get the parents to get involved, my students could really succeed.”

Ms. Karmacharya said, “There is not a relationship between poverty and poor performance, but there is a relationship between childhood experiences for a child in poverty versus childhood experiences in middle or upper class.”

Her statement is absolutely correct, and there is extensive research to back it up. What this means is that if a child is at a disadvantage in any way, even more time and attention must be given to make those “experiences” available to children.

Experiences, however, don’t require money; they just require time and attention.This can be as easy as reading to your child every night and exposing them to new vocabulary or eating dinner together as a family and letting each of the children tell stories from what happened during the day.

Yes, educators need to be accountable, but parents have the greater responsibility. If a child is not doing well in school, a parent’s love, attention, and involvement is the greatest key to that child’s success.

Source: Hattiesburg American, MS
http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20081022/OPINION03/810220333

Although school has been back for less than a month, it is likely that many children are already experiencing frustration and confusion in math class. Research at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada could change the way we view math difficulties and how we assist children who face those problems.

Daniel Ansari is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Western. He is using brain imaging to understand how children develop math skills, and what kind of brain development is associated with those skills.

Research shows that many children who experience mathematical difficulties have developmental dyscalculia - a syndrome that is similar to dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a child’s ability to read. Children with dyscalculia often have difficulty understanding numerical quantity. For example, they find it difficult to connect abstract symbols, such as a number, to the numerical magnitude it represents. They can’t see the connection, for instance, between five fingers and the number ‘5.’ This is similar to children with dyslexia who have difficulty connecting sounds with letters. In a recent study Ansari and graduate student Ian Holloway showed that children who are better at connecting numerical symbols and magnitudes are also those who have higher math scores. A report of this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

‘Research shows that many children have both dyslexia and dyscalculia. We are now exploring further the question of exactly what brain differences exist between those who have just math problems and those who have both math and reading difficulties,’ says Ansari.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of children with math difficulties, Ansari says that it becomes clear that children with developmental dyscalculia show atypical activation patterns in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex.

This research holds tremendous promise for people who, in the past, had simply accepted that they are ‘not good at math.’ Understanding the causes and brain correlates of dyscalculia may help to design remediation tools to improve the lives of children and adults with the syndrome.

‘We have some cultural biases in North America around math skills,’ says Ansari. ‘We think that people who are good at math must be exceptionally intelligent, and even more dismaying and damaging, we have an attitude that being bad at math is socially acceptable. People who would never dream of telling others they are unable to read, will proclaim publicly they flunked math.’

Ansari says that math skills are hugely important to life success and children who suffer math difficulties may avoid careers that, with help, might be a great fit for them.

Ansari is the recipient of an Early Researcher Award grant from the Ontario government and a CIHR grant. Ansari recently reviewed existing research in this field for the April edition of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and he hopes that news of this important research will also reach parents, teachers and individuals.

An article by Ansari entitled ‘The Brain Goes to School: Strengthening the Education-Neuroscience Connection,’ will be published in the upcoming Education Canada, the magazine of the Canadian Education Association. In the article Ansari says technological advances such as fMRI have provided unprecedented insights into the working of the human brain.

‘A teacher who understands brain structure and function will be better equipped to interpret children’s behaviours, their strengths and weaknesses, from a scientific point of view, and this will in turn influence how they teach,’ says Ansari.

Source: Science Centric, Bulgaria
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08102244

A lot of parents feel unhappy when seeing their children learning hard in early childhood, while others believe that early childhood is the best time to begin learning.

Most state-owned kindergartens do not teach English to pupils, while the Ministry of Education and Training does not have regulations on teaching foreign languages to small children. However, at people-founded kindergartens, foreign language lessons are a fixture.

Phuong, an expert at a scientific research institute in Hanoi, who has a daughter learning at the Kim Lien state-owned kindergarten, said that teaching English to small children is a kind of maltreatment.

Phuong said that she did not learn much when she was small, but she still became a PhD. She will not force her daughter to study hard. Phuong said that the most important thing now for a child like her daughter is good health.

Meanwhile, Thu, the owner of a limited company in Hanoi, does not share the same view. Thu learned about the syllabuses of many kindergartens before deciding to send her 2-year-old daughter to a kindergarten. There, Thu’s daughter has lessons in literature, music, games, English and many subjects to help children become cleverer.

“I want my daughter to get the most active education. As far as I know, in western countries, children begin learning when they are 2 years old,” Thu said.

Learning at the age of 3: good or bad thing?

According to Associate Prof Dr Nguyen Cong Khanh from the Hanoi Pedagogical University, a lot of parents worry that teaching children at the age of 3 will torment children. The parents believe that children at this age need more playing than learning. However, Khanh said that this is the wrong viewpoint.

Khanh said that if children have a suitable education, i.e. they can learn right in early childhood, they could have many more opportunities in their lives.

Source: VietNamNet Bridge, Vietnam
http://english.vietnamnet.vn/education/2008/10/809340/

Mamas, you might want to let your babies grow up to be mathematicians, especially if they’re girls.

It seems American students — especially females — may not be encouraged to excel in math, according to a new study, which claims that while many girls do have a knack for mathematics, they could be derailed by a combination of societal pressures, a less than stellar public school system, and a lack of role models. Boys aren’t immune, either. The study, published in this month’s issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society, paints a dreary picture of low math participation among both sexes as they get older.

Researchers examined years of results from challenging international math competitions to determine the gender and nationality of the participants and came to a number of conclusions. Though girls may be under-represented in math competitions, lots of them do quite well at math. The mathematical talent of American youth isn’t valued and nurtured as much as it is in other countries. American children of immigrants hailing from countries where math talent is appreciated — especially Asia and Eastern Europe — are more likely to be recognized as having exceptional math skills. And starting as early as middle school, cultivating strong math talent begins to go astray.

The reasons are many and complex. According to the study, “it is deemed uncool within the social context of USA middle and high schools to do mathematics for fun; doing so can lead to social ostracism. Consequently, gifted girls, even more so than boys, usually camouflage their mathematical talent to fit in well with their peers.” And: “girls perform as well if not better than boys in mathematics throughout elementary school; it is during the middle school years, an age when children begin to feel pressure to conform to peer and societal expectations, that they start to lose interest and fall behind in most, but not all countries.”

“We are wasting this valuable resource,” said Janet Mertz, senior author and professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a news release. “Girls can excel in math at the very highest level. There are some truly phenomenal women mathematicians out there.”

Maybe Mattel could make a Mathematician Barbie. It might erase the memory of that Teen Talk Barbie they came up with years ago that uttered this memorable phrase: “Math class is tough!”

Source: Los Angeles Times
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2008/10/girls-and-math.html

Many new mothers battling with tiredness and struggling to carry out the simplest of tasks would beg to differ.

But according to scientists, giving birth supercharges brain power to equip women for the challenge of rearing their child.

Having a baby produces a sudden surge of memory and learning ability that makes them more vigilant and alert, a study concluded.

And the changes in the size and shape of many areas of the brain last for decades, protecting against degenerative diseases later in life.

Researchers found there was often a decline in mental powers during pregnancy as the minds of mothers-to-be are remodelled.

But hormonal fluctuations during birth and breastfeeding increase the size of cells in some areas of the brain leading to dramatic improvements in mental capacity.

Studies on animals including rats and primates found mothers become much braver, are up to five times faster at finding food and have better spatial awareness than those without offspring.

Craig Kinsley, professor of neuroscience at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said he believed the same results applied to humans. ‘Pregnant women do undergo a phase of so-called baby brain, when they experience an apparent loss of function,’ he said.

‘However, this is because their brains are being remodelled for motherhood to cope with the many new demands they will experience.

‘Many benefits seem to emerge from motherhood, as the maternal brain rises to the reproductive challenge. When the going gets tough, the brain gets going.

‘The changes could last for the rest of their lives, bolstering cognitive abilities and protecting them against degenerative diseases.‘

A 2002 study by Angela Oatridge, from Hammersmith Hospital in London, reported that brain scans of pregnant women showed a 4 per cent decline in size.

Last year, two Australian researchers found that pregnant women consistently performed worse on tests for memory and verbal skills.

But Dr Kinsley believes this is because they are growing new sets of brain cells that he calls ‘maternal circuits’.

Nerve cells in areas known to be linked to parenting also expand and develop more connections with neighbouring cells during pregnancy to give mothers supercharged ‘computing’ power, he said.

He added: ‘Although most studies have so far focused on animals, it is likely women also gain long-lasting benefits from motherhood. Most mammals share similar maternal behaviours controlled by the same brain regions.’

Another study by the University of Toronto has found rats that had given birth were protected against degenerative diseases, with lower levels of a protein linked with Alzheimer’s disease in humans.

And a report by Thomas Perls, associate professor at Boston University medical school, found that women who become pregnant after the age of 40 are four times more likely to live to 100.

Dr Kinsley will report his findings to the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting next month.

Source: Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1076848/How-mother-boost-brainpower.html

Babies know “sad songs say so much” before they can walk or talk, according to musical experiments performed at Brigham Young University.

“We all know that when you talk to infants, they don’t understand the semantics, but they get the emotion,” Flom said. “One of the first things they understand is the tone of our speech. So they learn to segment speech between what is happy and positive and what is sad and negative.”

Happy speech is like happy music, more upbeat and with faster rhythms.

So how does a baby tell a professor she knows the difference between Beethoven’s upbeat Ninth Symphony and his sorrowful Seventh?

That’s an especially good question for Flom, whose mother forbade him from touching the family piano because his playing was more like noisemaking, and whose wife says he can’t sing.

“My wife tells me, ‘Shh! People can hear you!”‘ Flom said.

Flom and co-authors at Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota turned to a method that measures how long it takes for babies to get bored.

The researchers showed each baby an emotionally neutral face on a screen and played excerpts from three songs deemed happy tunes by preschoolers and adults without musical training.

All of the selections were instrumental. One of the happy tunes was the theme from “Peanuts.”

When a baby got bored with the three happy excerpts played over and over again and turned away, the researchers switched to two sad pieces. The babies showed renewed interest in the music because they recognized it was different.

In the control group, instead of switching to sad songs, the researchers played two new happy songs. The babies did not renew their interest.

“They understood changes in tempo, pitch or mode,” Flom said. “They pay attention to the global or more overall property of the music such as emotion.”

By 9 months, babies can discriminate between individual musical examples.

The study will be published in the next issue of the academic journal Infant Behavior and Development.

“What we really wanted to know, what I’m really trying to unravel, is how is it babies can learn so much in such a short period of time,” Flom said. “They are really good at picking up and discriminating between faces, voices and property in voices. We knew if you play a happy song to babies, they move more or are more active, and that if you play a lullaby, they become more calm.

“We thought, Maybe they can discriminate between different music? Lo and behold, they can.”

A BYU music professor was delighted to learn of the findings.

“The happy songs were all in major keys with fairly short phrases or motives that repeated,” Susan Kenney said in a university news release. “The tempo and melodic rhythms were faster than any of the sad selections, and the melodies had a general upward direction. Four of the sad songs were in minor keys, and all had a slower beat and long melodic rhythms.

“For an infant to notice those differences is fascinating.”

Source: Deseret News
http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705254540,00.html

The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.

The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math — the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers — they rarely are identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that U.S. culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls — and boys, too — from excelling in the field. The study will be published today in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

“We’re living in a culture that is telling girls you can’t do math — that’s telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math,” said the study’s lead author, Janet Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world’s most-demanding math competitions. “Kids in high school — where social interactions are really important — think, ‘If I’m not an Asian or a nerd, I’d better not be on the math team.’ Kids are self-selecting. For social reasons, they’re not even trying.”

Many studies have examined and debated gender differences and math, but most rely on the results of the SAT and other standardized tests, Mertz and many mathematicians say. But those tests were never intended to measure the dazzling creativity, insight and reasoning skills required to solve math problems at the highest levels, Mertz and others say.

Mertz asserts that the new study is the first to examine decades of data from the most difficult math competitions for young people, including the USA and International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, and the Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates. For the winners of these competitions, the Michael Phelpses and Kobe Bryants of mathematics, getting an 800 on the math SAT is routine. The study found that many students from the United States who participate in these competitions are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where education in mathematics is prized and mathematical talent is thought to be widely distributed and able to be cultivated through hard work and persistence.

Source: San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_10683875