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].

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