Neural regenerative training

Dr Patricia Kuhl

I met Portia Iversen while attending a writing workshop at the Esalen Institute in November, 2003. She was a screenwriter by day ..and a neuroscientist by night. I mean she would literally launch web crawlers overnight to see what research they found by morning that might help her son Dove who was somewhere on the spectrum of autistic disorders. When she discovered how little information there was, she started a foundation that awarded grants for research in the neurobehavioral sciences. The money came from the Hollywood movie industry, of which she was a member, and grants were awarded in the millions of dollars to research centers across the country that met two criteria: 1) they must have a reputation for working on developmental disorders and 2) they must be investigating neuro-regenerative practices. Needless to say, she got their attention. Universities around the country started ramping-up their labs to find techniques to help children suffering from either autism, dyslexia or attention deficit with the belief that these may not be discreet afflictions, but may fall somewhere on a distribution of early developmental imbalances. Today Portia is not only a screenwriter, but an author and member of the National Institute of Health. Her story is definitely worth reading [link].  Later at the lodge, she hands me a journal article and asks me to come up to speed so I could help her screen applicants. This led to a three-year collaboration where I learned about groundbreaking research in the neurosciences that literally blew me away. Since this is my first record of events, I’m going through my notes and starting from the beginning .. with the journal article Portia handed me.

Kuhl (2003) Foreign language experience in infancy [link]: It is generally accepted that phonemic awareness is ‘tuned’ by a child’s native language during the first year of life [link]. Initially we are capable of discerning differences between phonemes over a wide range of languages (known as the principle of equipotential). By the end of the first year however, the neural-pathways responsible for discerning native phonemes get established; and the pathways for discerning foreign phonemes, not available in the child’s verbal environment, get ‘pruned away’ by a process called juvenilization [link]. Language development is clearly an expression of the interaction between embryonics and environment outside the womb.

Findings: Dr Patricia Kuhl discovered that short-term exposure to foreign languages at nine months can significantly re-juvenilize areas of the child’s developing brain and help them retain the neuro-pathways for foreign phonemes (in this case English and Mandarin Chinese). Early language intervention can significantly alter the development of a child’s speech perception.

Naturalistic observation: Dr Kuhl cites evidence of neuro-plasticity in the wild. Zebra-Finches can be sufficiently influenced to override the innate preference for songs of their own species and learn the songs of a ‘foster’ Bengalis Finch that nurtured them.

Dyslexia: There is growing evidence to support the view that dyslexia starts out as an imbalance in the development of the auditory system. Neural pathways for phonemic awareness do not fully develop. Although it may not be severe enough to interfere with ordinary speech perception ..it can present problems with reading comprehension later in life [link]. Dr Kuhl cites studies being done at UC San Francisco that show intervention techniques that can: 1) enhance childhood auditory-development and 2) provide neuro-retraining exercises for later remediation [link] and [link].

continued ~> [link]

Receptivity theory

Dr Roger Schank

I have a theory. People who rate themselves as highly ‘consistent and uncompromising’ on issues are slower to adapt to change and less likely to learn from their mistakes. To put it bluntly, “I think inflexibility leads to arrested development”. Roger Schank has a model of speech comprehension that says sometimes people only tune-in long enough to retrieve the most likely script from memory [link]. After that, communication becomes a process of listening for information to fill-in the missing pieces. Tom Trabasso says script-based processing is a useful strategy but only when matters are highly predictable ..like listening to a kidnapping story where you can safely narrow your attention to the parts that talk about “what kind of force was used” or “what the kidnapper’s demands are.” My theory says that over-reliance on script-based processing is sort of like Procrustes bed in Greek mythology .. reception becomes limited to what conforms to a standard set of precedents in the listeners head. The rest is quickly dismissed as either immaterial, inconceivable or unacceptable (take for example John Boehner’s “Hell, no!” anti-Obama strategy, or Senator Russell Pearce’s claim that all opposing views are “treasonous”). I talked to Dr Thompson about it. Although he generally considers theories a dime a dozen, he thinks it merits attention and even suggested some ‘assessment tools’ I could use to measure ‘willingness to yield’ on issues. I didn’t think it would be hard getting people to admit to having an uncompromising nature and I have tests that measure how swiftly people handle unexpected events in a narrative. Now I’m interested in getting started and seeing what turns-up. Perhaps it’s already been done. I mean, you’d think it’d be a factor in Alzheimer’s or something. Considering the political atmosphere around here there’s bound to be some interest in the subject.

Therapeutic writing

Sian Beilock

Writing has been shown to replace ruminating. Ruminating is generally thought of as mental activity devoted to replaying past traumatic experience. It is a well-known contributor to clinical depression. That’s why writing workshops are often included in the treatment of depression. However, ruminating over future events, such as taking a high-stakes exam or something, can be equally disruptive. In this case, ruminating often leads to “choking” where students perform more poorly than expected given their skill level, especially when there are large incentives for optimal performance and negative consequences for poor performance. University of Chicago Psychologist Sian Beilock has found that the simple act of writing about anxiety can significantly reduce students’ chances of choking, especially if it’s done just prior to test-taking [link]. She says that when students are able to express their fears in writing, they’re given the satisfaction that they’ve dealt with them enough to move on and stop ruminating over them. This, in turn, releases space in working memory ..making it available to work on the task at hand.