``The researchers suspect that stressful environments and cognitive impoverishment are to blame, since in animals, stress and environmental deprivation have been shown to affect the prefrontal cortex. UC Berkeley's Marian Diamond, professor of integrative biology, showed nearly 20 years ago in rats that enrichment thickens the cerebral cortex as it improves test performance...''
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I've actually read some of Diamond's papers. The reference above doesn't do much justice to her theoretical side, which is pretty interesting stuff. This covers her and several other researchers. Briefly, these studies outline a theory of how fetal brain development is patterned by self-regulating and periodic electrical stimulation. The basic idea is the potential current paths stimulate the different parts of the developing brain to make their neural connections through enlongation growth of the axions(?). There is a built electric stimulation that is organized and cyclic, periodic, like a sin wave.
How does this work? For example, the sense perception organs are not connected at first, since they develop separately from different cell lines and tissues. So how do these organs `know' where and how to develop the necessary connections with the brain? The eyes grow in the front of the skull, but the optic nerves make their connections with the very back part of the brain. How do they know how to get there? Part of Diamond et al. theory is the connections follow these electrical pathways of potentials. They do this because the various growth triggers are also electro-chemically sensative. (or something like that)
This is some really tough going biophysics, biochemistry and developmental neuro-physiology done down on the cell and molecular level. It was some of the most exciting stuff I ever tried to study. Some of the studies took electric signal data in fetal brains (animals), and ran it through Fourier transforms to `see' the electric pattern and then discovered their periodic nature.
The relationship to low income kids and education is pretty obvious since brains remain plastic and all these connections are maintained and increase, although more slowly after puberty.
I have a mild criticism of the study. It doesn't look at the roll of physical play, running, jumping, dance. It's quite likely that higher income children are more involved in those kinds of after school activities than lower income kids. I would also want to look at a breakdown on low income kids and physical activities or involvement with the arts, especially below 9 or 10 (I mean doing, not just looking or listening). My hypothesis here is that some low income kids become great little atheletes. In that group, I would expect better performance then their low income peers.
The undermining of public education is making life worse, for obvious reasons. But even lately with some school reconstruction around here, I don't see big playgrounds, organized physical activities, or the re-building of the caferia system for school nutrition.
The science crew, like the UCB groups in this study, tend to follow socio-political assumptions that are built into their work, that they don't notice. In this case the mention of environnment and the nature of its accepted defficiencies,
``that stressful environments and cognitive impoverishment are to blame..''
``We think that with proper intervention and training, you could get improvement in both behavioral and physiological indices.''
Now I am going to pretend I am in a seminar with some of the people who conducted these studies. The topic is how to apply these results. The question is what kind of intervention and training? The implication is as applied to the kids. And the way that might play out given the current education system is, it may become another of those classroom experiments on poor kids, probably watered all the way down to a computer lab and some games, and spending quiet time... I am guessing that will not show results.
Where should effort and resources go instead? The same old place, the public infrastructure. You can make up a lot for low income stress and cognitive impoverishment by pouring money into public education. Wasn't that the social motivation for creating public education in the first place? So instead of trying to nuance the school curriculum once again. Let's start re-building inner city schools.
Anyway, listmembers know all this. But the internals of the public education and social policy debate often seem to ignore it.
CG