Reading training can change the dyslexic brain

May 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Dyslexia, being a learning disability affecting 5% to 10% of the population – especially impairing one’s ability to read and spell, can hinder a child’s ability to perform well academically1. In only 8-weeks of training, children (7 to 11 years of age) diagnosed with dyslexia showed improvements in reading skills alongside significant increases in brain volume.

A study by Anthony J. Krafnick and colleagues2 from Georgetown University discovered these relevant findings, providing insight into a potential way to offset the deficits associated with dyslexia with changes at the brain level.

Guest Post by Buddhika Bellana

Krafnick and colleagues used a training program, known as Seeing Stars3, specifically designed to help the children incorporate an integrated-modality approach to improve reading and comprehension. Reading text can be a strenuous task, relying heavily on a child’s verbal abilities. The program used in this study involved a more multisensory approach. Not only were the children taught to read text aloud, they were taught to simultaneously visualize each letter and word and draw them out in the air with their finger.

Instead of solely focusing on a child’s verbal ability, this training program also drew upon their visual and motor capacities, potentially providing a more concrete and thorough understanding of the letters and words they were taught to read. The intensive 8-week training progressed step-by-step: first focusing on letters, progressing to one-syllable, and finally multi-syllable words.

Before and after undergoing the 8-week training program, children received MRI scans (magnetic resonance imaging; a non-invasive method to look at structural changes in the brain) to compare for training-induced brain changes. Actual changes in brain volume were seen in areas of the brain associated with various reading abilities, areas that are typically under-activated in dyslexia. These fundamental changes in the brain were accompanied by improvements in reading skills and language skills.

MRI scans were also taken 8-weeks after training and many of these brain changes and improved performance persisted over the two months without any training.

This study may pave the way for future research into practical applications of similar training programs in educational settings, potentially providing a strategy to overcome the learning problems associated with dyslexia. Unlike previous approaches only attempting to modulate the superficial reading deficits, this study may prelude research into a more brain-based approach in treating dyslexia.

GUEST AUTHOR: This guest post was authored by Buddhika Bellana who is a student specializing in psychology at York University. He is currently a research assistant at the Cognitive Development lab at York University and at the Rotman Research Institute. His research interests especially lie in the neuropsychology of the aging brain.

References:

1. Siegel, L.S.. 2006. Perspectives on dyslexia. Paedriatrics and Child Health. 11 (9), 581-587.
2. Krafnick, A.J.; Flowers, D.L.; Napoliello, E.M.; Eden, G.F. 2011. Gray matter volume changes following reading intervention in dyslexic children. NeuroImage. 57, 733-741.
3. Bell, N., 1997. Seeing stars: Symbol imagery for phonemic awareness, sight words, and spelling. San Luis Obispo, CA: Gander Publishing.

Filed Under: Research in Action

The Parenting Instinct: It’s Wired in the Brain

April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Can a parent’s instinct be measured? Is it something you learn or something that’s ‘wired in’?

With only a few days until the Brain Power Conference we’ll be spending a lot of time learning about how a child’s brain develops – and show that a parent’s interactions with a child have a major impact on cognitive development. But what about the parent’s brain?

Researchers from The National Institute of Health along with scientists from Germany, Japan and, Italy have shown that the ‘parenting instinct’ is actually a specific response wired into our brains.

Image: Science Daily

Science daily reports on a study involving adults, who currently have no children of their own, who had FMRIs (brain scans) while being shown pictures of infants, adult humans and, both adult and baby animals.

The results were enlightening: participants showed significantly more brain activity while viewing the faces of human infants than they did from adult or animal faces.

Marc H. Bornstein from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development said that “These adults have no children of their own. Yet images of a baby’s face triggered what we think might be a deeply embedded response to reach out and care for that child”

The participants did not move or speak while undergoing the FMRI. The areas of the brain that lit up were indicative of how the brain looks when a person is about to care for an infant, showing that caregiver impulses are in fact physiological. The study reported that the areas of the brain were activated included:

“Premotor and preverbal activity — The researchers documented increased activity in the premotor cortex and the supplemental motor area, which are regions of the brain directly under the crown of the head. These regions orchestrate brain impulses preceding speech and movement but before movement takes place.

Facial recognition — Activity in the fusiform gyrus — on each side of the brain, about where the ears are — is associated with processing of information about faces. Activity the researchers detected in the fusiform gyrus may indicate heightened attention to the movement and expressions on an infant’s face, the researchers said.

Emotion and reward — Activity deep in the brain areas known as the insula and the cingulate cortex indicated emotional arousal, empathy, attachment and feelings linked to motivation and reward, the researchers said. Other studies have documented a similar pattern of activity in the brains of parents responding to their own infants.”

The research finally shows that the ‘parenting impulse’ isn’t just activated when a person has a child of their own, but are innate to the human brain. Further research in this area can not only help parents better understand their feelings but may also bring about new insight into why some parents can be neglectful or abusive, perhaps saving a child in the process.

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New York Times: The Bilingual Advantage and the Efficient Brain

March 26, 2012 By 1 Comment

Switching back-and-forth between languages is like a workout for the brain reports the New York Times, which explores how research is exploring why bilingualism might be a big advantage in a child’s cognitive development.

Much like learning music, it turns out that bilingualism plays, well, a dual purpose: giving kids the advantages of knowing a second language but also better preparing their brains for learning.

Having a bilingual brain means that there are often two language systems working concurrently. This can help hone the brain to suppress unneeded information and ‘train’ the brain to run more efficiently. Not only do the brains of bilingual kids weed out irrelevant information but they’re also tend to monitor there environment more effectively, this is especially true for children whom must switch languages briskly.

Image from New York Times

Why Bilingual Brains are More Efficient
“Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says researcher Albert Costa of the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

“It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.”

In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.”

The Times also reports on research by Dr. Ellen Bialystok who will be a keynote presenter at the Brain Power Conference, May 3-4.

“In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.”

Setting the Stage for Lifelong Cognitive Fitness
The benefits of being bilingual are not spent entirely on children. Research from The University of California, San Diego details the effect of bilingualism on the elderly as well. Bilingual adults are showing increased resistance to Alzheimer’s disease, the more proficient in language skills a person is the later Alzheimer’s onsets.

Join us at the Brain Power Conference as these and other issues are explained and explored with practical tips for parents and teachers on how the findings of neuroscience can give every child a leg-up on lifelong learning.

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Touch and the Autistic Child: The Brain Explains

March 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The simple challenge of hugging the autistic child can leave parents bewildered and frustrated, but by understanding a child’s brain parents might find new ways to cope.

Martha Kaiser, a neuroscientist from Yale, explains that new research shows that “the brains of people high in autistic traits aren’t coding touch as socially relevant.”

She explains that there’s a part of the brain, called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), that makes these kids sensitive to touch. “The OFC is very important for coding reward so maybe they’re feeling the touch but in these individuals, their brains don’t code that type of touch as being as rewarding as in individuals with fewer autistic traits.”

The findings are reported in a Time Magazine article:

Yale neuroscientists recruited 19 young adults and imaged their brain activity as a researcher lightly brushed them on the forearm with a soft watercolor paintbrush. In some cases, the brushing was quick, and in others slow: prior studies have shown that most people like slow brushing and perceive it as affectionate contact, while the faster version is felt as less pleasant and more tickle-like. None of the participants in the current study had autism, but the researchers evaluated them for autistic traits — things like a preference for sameness, order and systems, rather than social interaction. They found that participants with the highest levels of autistic traits had a lower response in key social brain regions — the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) — to the slow brushing.

According to Martha Kaiser, senior author of the study and associate director of the Child Neuroscience Laboratory at the Yale Child Study Center, the STS is a critical hub of the social brain. “This region is important for perceiving the people around us, for visual social stimuli and for perceiving social versus nonsocial sounds,” she says. The current findings suggest that the region is also involved in processing social touch and that its response is linked to the individual’s social ability, she says. The OFC, in contrast, helps the brain evaluate experiences — whether something is likely to be good or bad and if it involves pleasure or pain.

The ability to be physically involved with a child can be an extremely helpful tool when it comes to teaching and parenting. Researchers are currently working on ways to help autistic children respond more favorably to touch. If introduced early on these methods could have a positive impact on a child’s life and education.

 

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From the Lab to the Play and Classroom: How Brain Imaging Is Helping Kids

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

University of CaliforniaNeuroeducation holds the promise of a revolution in childhood development: by understanding how the brain grows and develops, we can figure out how to help prepare a child to learn.

But the promise of neuroeducation has only become possible because of advances in our ability to look inside the brain. The scientists at The University of California are using it to their advantage.

“It’s not that we’re going to scan every child’s brain and determine from there what kind of intervention or class they should be placed into,” says Silvia Bunge, a professor at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. “It’s more a proof-of-concept line of research. Showing that, what do you know, after a few months of a specific training we can see – we can measure – changes in the child’s brain structure and or brain functioning.”

Using Games To Impact the Brain

Researchers at UC are using games to better educate children in early concepts and skills including geometry, fractions, reasoning and processing skills. The children involved were also given brain scans showing a correlation between brain development and intellectual ability.

“In another study, she found that 25 percent of children, when given a task dealing with weights and balances, performed at an adult level while 25 percent of adults performed at a child’s level. She says by itself this is a fascinating bit of trivia. However, using neuroimaging, she discovered that performing at different levels was directly linked to different brain networks, regardless of whether it was a child or an adult. Not only does this show that a different brain system is used for advanced reasoning, it allows Rivera to pinpoint the moment of mastery.”

Helping Kids Who Need Help

Neuroimaging is not stopping at education; brain scans are also being conducted to better understand mental illness and deficiencies

“We’re beginning to get a handle on why kids with ADHD think it’s such a great idea to throw a spitball in classroom even if they know they’re going to get in trouble later.” says Steve Hinshaw, psychology professor at UC Berkeley. “Neuroimaging techniques have shown that maybe the core, underlying deficit isn’t just that you don’t pay attention but that you value immediate reward far more than long-term consequences.”

The Brain Power Conference, being held May 3-4 in Toronto, will explore all of these issues and more. The conference will bring leading neuroscientists together with teachers, parents, and professionals to answer the question: as we continue to better understand how the brain works, what does it mean for parents and teachers?

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Selfish Child, Selfish Brain? It May Be Built In

March 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Every parent has witnessed their little ones being selfish at least once, but it turns out they may be ‘wired’ that way! It turns out that selfish behaviour can be blamed, in part, on an underdeveloped region of the brain.

LiveScience reports on a new study suggesting that this could in fact be the case. The study was conducted at the Max-Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. During the study 146 children paired off and played two different games with each other:

In the study, 146 children participated in two games, played in pairs. In the “Dictator Game,” one child offered to share a reward, and another child could only accept what was offered. In the “Ultimatum Game,” one child could propose sharing the reward, but the other child could accept or reject the offer. If the child rejected the offer, neither child received a reward.

As was expected older children were more generous than their younger counterparts inferring that impulse control matured with the child. Brain scans were conducted on on both children and adults involved in the study that showed “a region called dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, located in the left side of the brain, toward the front, was more developed in adults. The area is considered to be involved with impulse control.”

LiveScience reports that “the results suggest that selfish behavior in children may not be due to their inability to know ‘fair’ from ‘unfair’, but rather an immature part of the brain that doesn’t support selfless behavior when tempted to act selfishly.”

Understanding how a child’s brain works is the topic of the Brain Power Conference, May 3-4 in Toronto. But just as important as understanding it is giving tools and insights to parents to know how to help their kid’s learn and grow – and when not to worry because sometimes a selfish act is all in the mind!

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Dr. Seuss May Not Just Be Fun, It’s Also Good For the Brain…

March 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Rhymes may be a key factor for young children learning to read reports LiveScience.

Research from McGill University in Montreal that suggests just that. “”If you hear one word, words that rhyme with that word will get activated in the brain” said Michael Wagner from McGill. But how does it work?

Educational consultant Miriam Cherkes-Julkowski puts it like this “The process of learning this is called “phoneme awareness,” and rhymes help kids figure it out” “Rhyme is the first step in actually segmenting out an individual phoneme-level sound, When you say cat/fat, what you’ve done is you’ve pulled the C away from the A, you’ve pulled the F away from the A.”

Human beings don’t truly read a word from left to right. When we see a word the brain very quickly scans all of the letters and their placement in order to figure out what a word truly sounds like.

“Take the word “rage.” If you start out with the R, you get an “Rrr” sound. Next, you have an A, but is it a long or a short A? There’s no way to know until you get the next letter — a G. “Aha,” you might think, “‘Rag!’ It’s a short A.” But now you hit that E, and it changes everything. Even the G doesn’t sound the same anymore. In other words, even when we’re not rhyming, we’re focused on the rime.”

Rhymes, music, language – all of them seem to unlock the potential in a child’s brain. To learn more about these and other tips and insights, join us for the First Annual Brain Power Conference in Toronto, May 3-4.

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Playtime Now Means Brain Time Later

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Play is important for a child’s cognitive development, and having Dad at home has an impact on the brain.

The Wall Street Journal has put out a press release detailing a fifteen-year study suggesting a strong link between a child’s early playtime and future academic success. It also found a positive effect from the contributions of a resident father.

The study focused on specific playtime activities including: encouraging and engaging in pretend play; presenting activities in an organized sequence of steps; elaborating on the pictures, words, and actions in a book or on unique attributes of an object; and relating play activity or book text to the child’s experiences.

University of Utah researcher Gina Cook puts it like this:

There has been extensive research done on the importance of early parent-child interactions on future educational experiences, but most have focused on the relationship with the mother…Our study looked at the combined long-term impacts of both maternal and paternal interactions in those critical stages of early development, and discovered that children not only benefit from the interactions they have with their mothers, but also their fathers.

Not only was it found that fathers contribute to a child’s future accomplishments but the study also suggests that when a father is at home, mothers themselves increase the learning activities with their children.

“Interestingly, when the biological father is living with the mother and child, mothers provide more cognitive stimulation to their toddlers, but it is the fathers in only these families who really add something more to their children’s early environments,” added Cook. “It is important for parents to engage with their children during the vital, early stages of brain development, because that early exposure to cognitive stimulation with both mothers and fathers can have a long-lasting and positive influence on the educational success of at-risk children.”

The specific kinds of play that help a child’s brain to develop are one of the many topics to be covered at the Brain Power Conference in Toronto, May 3-4. Join us as neuroscientists, experts in parenting, and teachers take us on a tour of how a child’s brain works and what practical things we can do to help it grow.

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Misconceptions About A Child’s Brain and it’s Ability to Heal

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Recent developments in the fields of kinesiology suggest that the long held belief that an adolescent brain is more resilient to concussions is in fact a misconception.  US News reports on a study at the University of Montreal in which 96 patients, all of whom had suffered from a concussion, were given tests monitoring both memory and thinking speed approximately six months after they sustained the injury. All age groups within the study showed marked deficits in these cognitive functions during the test. This demonstrated that a child’s brain is at the very least just as susceptible to injury as that of an adult.

“Often parents and coaches will think that a child’s brain is more resilient,” says Dave Ellemburg, the professor heading up the study. ”That’s not the case. Even 6 to 8 months after the injury, we find marked deficits.”

Research is increasingly shattering the long-held belief that a child’s brain is somehow more resilient. It’s becoming apparent that the tests currently in use by several sports organizations as well as schools are not as effective at measuring long term damage from a concussion as was once believed. A patient given these tests may perform well but they’re brains are working in unusual ways to get the job done.

Prof. Ellemburg puts it like this: “The brain is struggling much more than it normally would to complete the tasks.”

The Brain Power Conference, May 3-4 in Toronto, will explore how parents and teachers can help a healthy child’s brain to develop. With guest speakers from the Brain Injury Association, there are lessons to be learned from what happens when a brain is harmed as well. Join us for two days of workshops and presentations that will explore these topics.

 

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The Science of the Brain Can Translate Thoughts into Speech

February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

New research is being put forth from UC Berkley that offers new insights into how the brain processes language and holds the promise of unlocking new ways to understand how children learn and grow. In the long-term, the research could possibly lead to an implantable device within the brain that can decode thought and produce speech.

The science is not all that complicated: software has been developed that measures and deciphers brain waves when a person hears a word and then attempts to play it back.

The study was conducted on 15 patients within the U.S who were already undergoing neurosurgery to treat intractable epilepsy.  A net of sensors was placed on the brain of the patients. Words were then repeated for ten minutes and the results were collected and analyzed.

This is exciting in terms of the basic science…” said Robert Knight, “Potentially, the technique could be used to develop an implantable prosthetic device to aid speaking, and for some patients that would be wonderful.”

The research highlights the ways in which what happens in the ‘lab’ has a wider impact on how we understand a child’s brain. The discoveries of neuroscience continue to shed light on early childhood development and the ways in which we can help a brain to grow and develop, or to support people with impairments.

To learn more about how neuroscience provides insights that parents or teachers can use, join us at the first annual Brain Power Conference in Toronto, May 3-4 2012.

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