Neural basis of PTSD

Anxiety is a conditioned emotional response. First it focuses attention, and then it clamps the brain into rigidity by obsessively replaying past traumas [link].

Coming of age in a combat zone is bound to leave a deep impact on the tissues of the mind. I know that early experience with driving, while exposed to roadside bombs, can lead to phobias for city and highway driving. Witnessing the devastation of a mortar attack on a remote Afghan village can make a walk in the park seem like a high-risk venture and experiencing the impact of bombs detonating in town square can make it hard to sit still at Denny’s. Hearing someone say, “you’ll get over it” is not going to sound all that convincing. Why ..? I have a theory. We already know that the networks of the mind continue developing well into a person’s twenties. In fact most neural-development takes place outside the womb where it can be guided by culture and experience. I believe when combat is someone’s introduction to the ‘ways of the world’, it profoundly affects development that prepares them for adulthood. Depending on a soldier’s degree of resilience going in, the experience can produce a conditioned anxiety so pervasive; it becomes debilitating. It’s not uncommon for veterans to feel suspicious when neighbors knock .. panic in public places. Or they may find themselves taking different routes to work everyday ..sleeping less than five hours a night and barricading themselves indoors all weekend. Early combat experience becomes neurologically ‘cemented’ in the naive soldier’s mind creating a generalized fear that, at any point, at any time, someone’s going to take their life.

Gene pool

The qualities I was born with do not necessarily come from my parents ..it turns out that they could not have been ‘genetically engineered’ with much success either..not that anybody would want to try. No, life in the womb is way too volatile for that. Scientists - reporting in the journal of Nature - say they have found genes that can introduce random variation during embryonic development of the nervous system ..causing deviations from the genetic blueprint that guides the growth of the brain. Genes called ‘retro-transposons’ jump around in neural stem cells ..the cells that give rise to tissues in the brain and nervous system. Retro-transposons act to produce changes in the electro-chemical properties of nerve cells ..changing how they respond to signals ..and the way they link up to form networks. This explains why individual brains differ so much, even between identical twins ..allowing traits to vary from one generation to the next ..without waiting a millennium for some ‘cosmic mutation’ to occur. It also explains why ‘selective breeding’ for psychological traits - such as IQ or music ability - is not always a sure thing. I don't think we have to worry about creating a master race. Life defies our attempts to control these events.

Miguel Aguilar

Miguel Aguilar has been recognized as one of the most effective teachers in the L.A. unified school district. By devising a method of his own for teaching reading and language skills, he moved his students from the bottom 30% in the district to well above average. When they looked at what he was doing, they found he wasn’t simply ‘teaching to the test’. He broke the material down and prompted students to identify narrative components while they read. For instance, he would frequently stop and ask them questions about the goals and actions of the characters. He Then did something interesting. He would ask the class if they understood what kind of information he was looking for. Example: was it an inference about the character’s intention or a prediction about the consequences of their action. He wasn’t just teaching them to read the narrative explicitly ..but how to process the narrative implicitly [link]. I’ve heard people refer to this as the ‘meta’ or ‘pragmatic’ levels of comprehension. Studies show that when students start doing this on a regular basis, they become more active participants in what they previously considered to be a passive activity .. and reading scores improve dramatically [link].

Best practices in education

During graduate school, I figured the easiest way to tell if a teaching method was effective would be to use students as their own benchmark. I proposed collecting per-student changes periodically over time to evaluate a new teaching method. That way I could control for background and socio-economic factors that I didn’t have the time or facilities to deal with [link] . Per-student changes were averaged and the net change was used to see if a one teaching method was better or worse than another.

This is the basis for the ‘value-added’ method that’s currently being proposed for the LA Unified School district to evaluate the performance of teachers. Students act as their own benchmark. Prior year performance is compared with current year. Because it measures students against their own track record, it largely controls for influences outside the classroom. The aggregate net-change from one year to the next is telling. It may not be perfect, but it is the most representative and least contaminated method we have for identifying the most effective teaching practices in a heterogeneous school district [link].

Social Anxiety

Children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones, a new study shows. “If you misread facial expressions, you’re in trouble, no matter what other social skills you have,” says Emory psychologist Steve Nowicki, a clinical researcher who developed the tests used in the study. “It can make life very difficult, because other people’s faces are like a prism through which we look at the world.” Nowicki coined the term "dyssemia," meaning the inability to process signs. They also developed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (DANVA) to assess subtle cues to emotional expressions, including visual signals and tone and cadence of voice. DANVA is now widely used by researchers in studies of everything from behavioral disorders to autism spectrum conditions. “..nonverbal communication can be taught. It's a skill, not something mysterious." They have found that in a range of children with behavioral disorders, including high-functioning autism, direct teaching can improve their non-verbal communication [link].