Newsweek can you build a better brain

Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it. Get Smarter. Many of the concepts that could make us smarter are well established and not particularly abstruse, but not widely known even among the educated. There are countless unanswered questions about why Jared Loughner allegedly went on a shooting rampage, but of this we can be sure: across America there are thousands of parents of older adolescents and young adults who are terrified that their child's strange behavior, paranoid rants, drinking, drug abuse, conspiracy fantasies, and other red flags of mental illness will lead to violence.

According to forensic psychiatrists, the answer is "not easily. It's probably not going out on a limb to say that John Boehner's waterworks—the man cries when his party wins control of the House, when he thinks about kids, when he walks down the House aisle to take the Speaker's gavel—are not meant to reduce sexual arousal in women. To any woman having surgery for breast cancer, the words she most wants to hear in the recovery room are, "We got it all.

Can You Build a Better Brain? Blueberries and crossword puzzles aren't going to do it. But as neuroscientists discover the mechanisms of intelligence, they are identifying what really works. Richard Branson's Climate-Change Agenda.

His empire includes airlines, mobile phones, digital publishing, and space travel. Why the billionaire high-school dropout has added climate change to his agenda. Even before their midterm debacle, Democrats couldn't pass an energy-climate bill worth the name. So why are renewable-energy advocates smiling?

In terms of being the director of NIH, I don't think anybody who's worked with me would be able to identify a circumstance where my personal beliefs about faith have in any way interfered with my role as a scientific leader. Popular articles do offer advice to parents. Often the brain-based advice offered to parents is oddly vague, contradictory, and what one might call "middle-class traditional.

What should parents do to build better brains? What matters most during those early years? Instead of specific advice and a few new insights, parents are told that everything matters in those early years — loving, holding, talking, reading, and exploring the environment.

During the critical years, when experiences can permanently rewire the brain, we should engage children in culturally valued activities. Early, but not later, exposure to music, art, or chess can, parents are told, change the fine anatomy of the child's brain forever.

Parents should make use of the windows of developmental opportunity nature has provided, applying a full-court developmental press every minute during the birth-to-3 developmental season.

Failure to exert full-court pressure can have long-term consequences. Parents must begin to realize that "if they, or their baby sitter, or day care provider isn't speaking articulately to baby, SAT scores may be at stake. The advice provided is sufficiently vague to leave parents deeply uncertain and profoundly anxious about what they should do differently and about what does matter — other than everything -- during the early years.

Not only is the advice vague, but it is also contradictory. Brain-based parenting advice has the same character as the advice one gets from reading books on nutrition and diet that you can find in most airport bookstores. You want to live to be ? You should have a glass of red wine every day, but avoid alcohol. Here is one example sure to leave parents confused. The major theme in brain-based advice to parents is the importance of early stimulation during the critical years to facilitate optimal brain development.

Those are the years during which parents, if they provide the right kind of stimulation, can build better brains. It is during those years that they and their baby-sitters can improve or damage future SAT scores. One would think that the science-based parenting advice surrounding such a central theme would be pretty clear-cut.

It isn't. Parents are sometimes told that it is time to throw out Dr. Benjamin Spock and his old advice to new parents, "Trust your common sense. Because we now know that "for the majority of fathers and mothers, doing the things that maximize a child's potential is not intuitive.

To fully exploit nature's windows of opportunity, an article in the Chicago Tribune cited this expert advice: "People often ask Dr. Harry Chugani how much mental stimulation a baby should receive.

Chugani, a pediatric neurologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, said no precise answer can be given, but generally 'as much as you can. On the other hand, parents are also told that although optimal stimulation is good, too much stimulation is bad.

The amount of talking, reading, and singing must be carefully matched to the child's developmental level, personality, and mood. According to child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan, as quoted in Newsweek, "Only 20 to 30 percent of parents know how to do this instinctively. Yet other popular articles in Newsweek, Time, and Working Mother tell parents that the implications of brain science are not that radical and that the new discoveries reaffirm Dr.

Spock's endorsement of common sense. Parents are told that science is, in fact, reaffirming what our parents and grandparents knew instinctively. In Sandra Blakeslee's New York Times article on the White House Conference, parents were told that although talking to babies is important, "the curriculum that most benefits babies is simply common sense. Parent might well ask, "So, what is it I should do? One place a bewildered parent might look for answers to these questions is the I Am Your Child Web site, the official site for the Reiner Foundation's national awareness campaign.

If we were to find a clear, concise brain-based message for parents, we would expect to find it there. Once at the Web site, under the heading "The First Years Last Forever," a parent would find five paragraphs on brain development, in which brain science is presented in a very general, but accurate, way a parent would read that an infant's brain has billion nerve cells that grow and connect to form the circuits that control our senses, movement, and emotions.

Early childhood experiences "help to determine brain structure, thus shaping the way people learn, think, and behave for the rest of their lives. There is another section called "Brain Facts," which informs parents about early synapse formation, how experience shapes brain circuitry, and how critical periods or "prime times" occur during brain development.

A parent would also read that the kind of care a child receives during these critical periods can effect development and that warm, responsive care is good for the brain. I Am Your Child presents ten guidelines that parents can use to promote children's healthy development. Among these guidelines are: Be warm, loving, and responsive; talk, read, and sing to baby; use discipline to teach; be selective about TV watching; choose quality day care.

There is nothing controversial on the list, but there is nothing on the list that would prompt the average parent to say, "Wow, I never heard that before! There are video clips on the Web site in which experts offer advice to parents. The experts include T. Berry Brazelton, Barbara Bowman, C. Everett Koop, and Bruce Perry. For the most part, these experts have substantial followings and deserved reputations in child development and public health, but none, with the possible exception of Perry, would consider himself or herself an expert in developmental neurobiology.

The site provides a list of links to other parenting Web sites and a bibliography of the parenting and child development literature that cites works published between and If parents go to the site thinking that they will find new insights into parenting practices, derived from brain research, that will optimize brain, intellectual, and social development, they will be disappointed.

After visiting the site and its associated links, many parents might still be wondering what all the fuss is about.

A parent who reads the I Am Your Child guidelines carefully, however, might notice that the guidelines emphasize the importance of a secure relationship, or secure attachment, between caregiver and child and what such a relationship means for a child's social and emotional development. This connection appears under the first guideline "Be warm, loving, and responsive" and links responsive care and secure relationships to research on attachment theory a theory we will examine more closely in the next chapter.

I Am Your Child states that research on attachment shows that children who receive warm and responsive care and who are securely attached to their caregivers cope with difficult times more easily when they are older.

Securely attached infants are more likely to develop a healthy response to stressful situations, and this response is, the Web site suggests, the result of optimal early brain development.

According to some attachment theorists, secure attachments are formed, or fail to form, during the first three years of life. This is why parents should provide warm, loving care, respond to baby's cues and clues, establish routines, establish a close tie to your child by talking, singing, and reading, and look for childcare that does all of the above. The importance and lifelong consequences of attachment form the central message of I Am Your Child.

It is no accident that the site's page introducing advice for parents carries the banner "The First Years Last Forever" and that the final words of advice are "the first years truly last forever.

It is this theoretical viewpoint that is at the basis of Reiner's conviction that all roads lead to Rome and that we should view children and the world through the prism of the first three years. This is why, as Reiner told the county government representatives to applause, "justice begins in the high chair, not the electric chair. However, a thoughtful parent reading the Web site might also notice something else. There are some general statements about brain development, followed by ten rather traditional parenting guidelines, guidelines that for the most part emphasize social and emotional development.

But just what is the connection, for example, between the billion nerve cells, developing healthy brain circuitry, and selective TV watching? Do we know that one hour of television is good for the brain, two hours bad, and no television whatever the best of all? The short answer: no. I Am Your Child suggests that there is a connection between brain science and the parenting advice, but like Starting Points and the White House Conference, it is not all that clear or specific about what that connection is.

There is talk about the brain, followed by some hand waving, followed by advice to parents. None of this instills much confidence in the claim that the new brain science is about to revolutionize parenting and childcare. There are additional reasons why we should be skeptical about the benefits of viewing the world through the prism of the first three years. Neuroscientists, as opposed to early childhood advocates, have a somewhat different view concerning the possible implications of early synapse formation, critical periods, and enriched environments for early childhood.

According to the brain and early childhood literature, early stimulation somehow affects early synapse and brain circuit formation. It implies that parents and caretakers can influence this process and that we know in some detail what kinds of early experiences would result in the desired brain circuits and in optimal brain development.

Neuroscientists, even neuroscientists who have been involved in discussions of early brain development, have a different view. In a September Scientific American article, Carla Shatz noted that if we observe children's behavior, it is evident that children who are grossly neglected — left in their cribs for the first year of life — develop motor skills abnormally slowly. From this observation, it is reasonable to infer, she says, that children do require a normal environment for normal development.

Children need normal tactile, linguistic, and visual stimulation to develop normally. However, she continues, "Based in part on such observations, some people favor enriched environments for young children, in the hopes of enhancing development. Yet current studies provide no clear evidence that such extra stimulation is helpful Much research remains to be done before anyone can conclusively determine the types of sensory input that encourage the formation of particular neural connections in newborns.

If so, we should not be surprised that brain-based parenting advice is vague and contradictory. The brain and early childhood literature suggests that the first three years of life is the critical period for brain development. It's a time when the young brain's learning power is almost limitless.

As Hillary Clinton describes it, "The computer comes with so much memory capacity that for the first three years it can store more information than an army of humans could possibly input.

By the end of three or four years, however, the pace of learning slows. The computer will continue to accept new information, but at a decreasing rate But it is clear that by the time most children begin preschool, the architecture of the brain has essentially been constructed.

From that time until adolescence, the brain remains a relatively eager learner with occasional 'growth spurts,' but it will never again attain the incredible pace of learning that occurs in the first few years. There is this shaping process that goes on early, and then at the end of this process, be that age 2, 3 or 4, you have essentially designed a brain that probably is not going to change very much more. This interpretation of critical periods assumes that the brain learns best and is unusually plastic only during the early, superdense years.

It also assumes that the experiences we have during those years are particularly powerful and have long-term, irreversible consequences. Again, neuroscientists; see it a little differently. In a review on child development and neuroscience, Charles Nelson and Floyd Bloom deftly summarize our emerging understanding of how molecular and cellular events contribute to brain development.

Most important, they also discuss some genuinely new findings in neuroscience — what happens in the brain when adults learn new motor skills and the rapidity with which the adult brain can reorganize after loss of sensory input from an amputated limb. The new findings Nelson and Bloom allude to suggest that the brain retains its ability to reorganize itself in response to experience or injury throughout life. They conclude, " Although clearly much of brain development occurs late in gestation through the first years of postnatal life, the brain is far from set in its trajectory, even at the completion of adolescence.

Although not in a scientific journal, the neuroscientist Arnold Scheibel, who, with his wife Marian Diamond, has studied the effects of enriched environments on brain development, arrived at a similar conclusion. In an article he wrote on the implications of the new brain science for education, Scheibel expressed reservations about popular claims that the brain's ability to learn varies during development and that teaching should be keyed to those critical periods when the brain is most receptive.

But I believe this is an inaccurate conclusion drawn from improperly interpreted structural and functional data. Finally, the brain and early childhood literature tends to misinterpret the significance of research on the effects of enriched environments on brain development. The policy and popular articles assume that if early experiences during the critical period sculpt the brain for life, then rich, complex early experiences will sculpt rich, complex brains for life: "Research bears out that an enriched environment can boost the number of synapses that children form.

Infants who are not held and touched, whose playfulness and curiosity are not encouraged, form fewer of these critical connections. Neuroscientists who have done research on the effects of enriched environments on brain structure take a different view.

In , William Greenough, one of the most prominent researchers in this area, wrote a short piece for the APA Monitor, a publication of the American Psychological Association. He stated that despite the claims of children's education organizations and articles in the popular press on how early childhood experiences can enhance children's cognitive development between the ages of 0 and 3, the neuroscience used to support these claims is not new.

Furthermore, he continued, careful examination of the evidence does not support a selective focus on the first three years. Experience plays a major role in brain development, but claims that it plays a more important role in the first three years than at other times need to be assessed carefully. He emphasizes that his own, oft-cited research on animals raised in complex environments indicates that the brain continues to be plastic — modifiable by experience — throughout later development and into adulthood.

According to Greenough, the existing neuroscientific and behavioral evidence do not support an exclusive focus on birth to 3 to the relative exclusion of older age groups.

If so, we should be wary of claims that the only, or the most important, time to provide enrichment is the early years. At this early point in our exploration of brain science and child development, what these neuroscientists are saying should serve to heighten our skepticism about what we read in the papers and see on the Internet.

Their comments should at least prompt us to take a more careful, critical look at brain science and the merits of viewing the world through the prism of the first three years. Of course, by themselves the neuroscientists' assertions bear no more weight than do those of the most fervent birth-to-3 brain advocate.

However, the neuroscientists have reasons for saying what they do, reasons that derive from their weighing and consideration of the existing scientific evidence. So, rather than merely listing authorities and assertions pro and con, it is time that we look carefully at that evidence.

After we review the evidence in the subsequent chapters, we will see that we do not have a revolutionary, brainbased action agenda for child development. What we have instead is the Myth of the First Three Years. Just as an engine gets out of tune, and is analyzed by a computer display, so is the brain in real-time. We now know that the brain can develop new neural pathways and can stabilize itself if given the correct feedback. Neurofeedback is a non-invasive, gentle process that happens quickly at the ear liest level of conscious recognition.

There are no known side effects and it is not an addictive process. There are positive side effects of neurotherapy also known as EEG Biofeedback that come with the benefits such as a quieting and calmness in the body. People are often surprised by this outcome. A new type of feedback has been added to what we offer.

It is called NeuroField.