Saturday | February 17, 2001

Brain research is enticing but easily misapplied
02/12/2001
By Sue Goetinck Ambrose / The Dallas Morning News
Second of two parts
Tell the kids to pull on their earlobes, the speaker advised, to rev up
their brains' auditory cortex for a day of learning.
It was a well-meaning suggestion, offered by a teacher at a conference
for educators last year in Boston. Neuroscientists, however, scoff.
Sounds entering the ear, and not tugs on the earlobe, tickle the part of
the brain responsible for hearing. But educators eager to help children
learn better can be easily misled by pseudoscience disguised as solid
brain research.

"That's a real shame," said Patricia Kuhl, a speech and hearing scientist
at the University of Washington in Seattle. "That doesn't do parents,
teachers or neuroscientists any good. It completely loses the distinction
between testimonials and truth."

Putting brain research to use in classroom settings is an enticing idea,
experts say. After all, children learn with their brains. So it follows that a
better understanding of the brain can lead to better teaching. Indeed,
dozens of books offer teaching methods based on the latest brain
findings. But neuroscientists doing the brain research say that although
some of those books may be useful, others will fall by the wayside.

Already, intriguing brain findings are put to use – or misuse – too soon.
Brain research does have the potential to enhance education someday,
Dr. Kuhl and others say. The new world of brain science should improve
education in general and help teachers adapt to the different learning
styles of different children.

"I think that a mature neurobehavioral science – and now I'm talking
maybe on the order of 20 to 50 years – will bring about a lot of
enlightenment in the way we go about trying to educate kids," said
William Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University School of
Medicine in California.

Driven by the advances of the 1990s, the congressionally designated
Decade of the Brain, neuroscientists have discovered unprecedented
details about how the brain's billions of cells process sights and sounds,
store memories and learn language. The latest tools for probing the brain
provide insights into impairments such as dyslexia, retardation and
autism.

"There is a lot of work going on that is going to be applicable," Dr. Kuhl
said. But "it's a little early to imagine that we can take the findings of
neuroscience and apply them to the classroom today."

Science moves slowly, and conclusions are typically very limited, Dr.
Kuhl points out. But that's often lost on a public eager to provide the
best for its children. Take the so-called Mozart effect, the notion that
listening to Mozart can improve intelligence. The 1993 study that started
the Mozart craze was performed on college students. Their ability to
perform better on a few mental tasks lasted only a few minutes.

Still, marketers seized on the Mozart notion, publishing books such as
Learning With the Classics or CDs titled Mozart Makes You Smarter that
promise benefits to young adults, children and even babies in the womb.

Although listening to Mozart may not do any harm, the frenzy has
followed the initial study shows how easily brain findings can get
distorted when they seep out of the lab and into the public
consciousness.

"Someone just made up the idea that it would be effective for kids," Dr.
Kuhl said. "The real answer is we don't know."

Accidental emphasis
Emphasis on brain development between birth and age 3 has enjoyed a
different kind of distortion, many scientists say. Even former President
Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined in, convening a 1997
White House symposium to advocate speaking and reading to children
early in life. But Dr. Kuhl points out that while the first three years are
important, the emphasis on those years and not others is really an
accident.

"It's simply pointing the spotlight where the new information is," Dr.
Kuhl said. "If we had come up with findings about the teen-age brain,
we'd be talking about that. Those don't happen to be the studies going
on at the moment."

Most of the research that could one day improve education is still in its
infancy – aimed at understanding what goes on naturally in a learning
brain.

For instance, Dr. Kuhl's own research has shown that "parentese," the
babyish language used when speaking to infants, actually helps babies
recognize the sounds of speech.

"We wouldn't have imagined that babies lying in their cribs in the first
six months of life are mapping the sounds of language just by listening
to us prattle on," Dr. Kuhl said.

Still, the applications of those studies are limited, she said.
"It's not as though we can improve on this, because we do it anyway,"
she said. "But we can point out that it is a good thing."

Brain programming
Detailed brain research on learning in older individuals is also at an early
stage. Scientists are just starting to peer deep into the brains of people
with learning difficulties, in hopes of understanding how a particular
brain "programming" translates into aptitudes and talents.

For example, scientists are conducting brain imaging studies of children
with mental retardation, said Dr. Allan Reiss, a psychiatrist at Stanford.
"We're at the level now where we're trying to use tools like ... imaging to
tell us what brain mechanisms are involved in both typical and atypical
learners," Dr. Reiss said.

Still, research into learning difficulties is a slow process.
For instance, a study published last year in the journal Neuron found
that among poor readers, nerve fibers in a particular area of the brain had
a different structure than in normal readers.

The findings were striking, but tricky to interpret, said Russell Poldrack,
the Massachusetts General Hospital researcher who led the study. It
could be that early in the poor readers' lives, the nerve fibers formed in a
way that would make reading difficult later on. On the other hand, it
could be a case of "the rich getting richer," he said. Better readers could
have spent more time reading, causing their brains to take on a different
form.

The difficulty in reaching a firm conclusion shows how slowly brain
research can progress. Although a study showing differences in the
brains of good and poor readers contributes valuable clues, it's just one
step in the complex mystery of reading problems.

"It's significant in the large picture in understanding how brains are
organized differently," Dr. Poldrack said. "You want to know what the
differences are so you can try to explain them."

Sounds and reading
A more recent study, published by Dr. Poldrack and colleagues in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the
brains of people with dyslexia react less when their "owners" listen to
rapidly changing sounds. That fits with a theory that people with
dyslexia can have problems reading out loud because their brains have
trouble matching the different sounds in a word with letters on the page.
Being able to distinguish rapidly changing sounds is important in telling
the difference between certain speech sounds, such as "ba" vs. "da."
The researchers went further, putting three people with dyslexia through
a specialized training program. After the training program, testing
showed that two of the three were better able to hear quickly changing
sounds. And brain scans showed that the newly trained subjects' brain
responses were more like those of normal readers.

That shows, Dr. Poldrack said, that the brains of people with learning
difficulties can be reprogrammed.

Still, there is much to be learned, he said, about the training program,
known as Fast ForWord. Working on the notion that many poor readers
also have trouble processing the sounds of speech, scientists at
Scientific Learning, a Berkeley, Calif., company, devised the Fast
ForWord computer program to retrain children's brains to understand
spoken language better.

At the beginning of training, sounds that are difficult for any one child
are exaggerated and played slowly. To move to the next level, the child
must click on the picture that corresponds to the instructions. As the
child progresses, the computer gradually advances to natural-sounding
speech.

Neuroscientists regard it as one of the more sophisticated applications
of brain research to education. And some school districts report that the
program has helped their students.

Results in Houston
Three Houston schools that used Fast ForWord, for example, found
that, after six to eight weeks of training, students moved from the 10th
percentile to the 44th percentile in understanding spoken words and
sentences, said Dr. Steve Miller of Scientific Learning. Several schools
in the Dallas area initiated the program at the start of the school year.
Test results are being compiled.

Still, Dr. Poldrack noted, he and other scientists are only now trying to
confirm the benefits of the training by running independent tests.
"People are ... interested right now in replicating the degree to which it
does what it's said to do," he said. "Is it a placebo effect? Is it better
than any other kind of intervention?"

If it is, scientists will still have questions, Dr. Poldrack said. Fast
ForWord training has many aspects, and scientists will want to know
which aspect is responsible for the improvements in language.
Although researchers say that neuroscience will one day make valuable
contributions to education, a better system is needed to help teachers
and parents separate the solid science from the snake oil. Even
scientists have trouble keeping up with such a vast and complicated
area of research.

"In relation to the fundamental neurobiology literature, there are tens of
thousands of papers written a year," said Michael Merzenich,a
neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco, and co-
founder of Scientific Learning. "We're talking about an enormously
difficult subject, even for a specialist like me."

Dr. Merzenich says he favors an independent watchdog agency to
evaluate the applications of brain research to education.
"Schools need help in sorting these things out objectively," he said.

(c)  2001 The Dallas Morning News

http://www.dallasnews.com/science/285345_neuroeducation.html

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