An author* argues the case that kids need good Spatial Literacy (Grow With the Flow’s Visual-Spatial Intelligence). Agreed. But the article turns, apparently without examination, to ask “What kinds of teaching best support spatial learning?”

Teaching Spatial Literacy: Study groups. Curriculum committees. Textbook exercises with “correct” answers. Accountability. Exams. Worksheets. Final projects.

Helping a student learn Spatial Literacy: Legos. Cuisenaire rods. Maps. Video Games. Wait a sec – I said all this already:

• blocks, beads, paints (and finger paints, water colors, and acrylics are all very different), clay, sand, kitchen utensils, boxes, straws, toothpicks, leaves, kid scissors, tape, flour-and-water paste, things you squish, balloons, magnets, construction paper, knitting and weaving tools, scraps for collages, crayons and markers, paper cups, paper clips….
• Your junk drawers are worth their weight in gold: scraps of cloth and paper, empty food cartons, paper towel tubes, junk mail…
• Get big sheets of paper for drawing. (Sometimes newspapers will give you the end of their gigantic rolls.)
• Number + Visual-Spatial Intelligences: Drawing is about geometry as well as art.
• The styrofoam that surrounds your new appliance makes great space stations.
• Keep art in your house — on the walls and on the shelves; two-dimensional and three-dimensional, representational and abstract; western and nonwestern, intentional and found…
• Ask your librarian for help exploring the full range of the wonderfully talented artists who have graced children’s books. The Caldecott award list is an “official” source.
• Encourage your child to think about finding her way in spaces. “Do you know what’s over that hill?” “Can you find the aisle where the spaghetti is?”
• When you build your model of the solar system (see “Number Intelligence”), be sure to color each planet from those great NASA photos.
• Make maps — of your house, neighborhood, state, planet…or “Imagine a new world.”
• Once you can do the puzzle right-side up, try it from the back, using only shape — do it on a board, so you can sandwich it and flip it over later.
• There is a huge variety of computer games which develop visual-spatial thinking. It can be reassuring to look at a game your kid has been playing for several hours and think “Well, that’s certainly developing his spatial mapping abilities.”
• More and more data is represented visually: Fortunately, learning how to interpret and make graphs, charts, tables, figures, and what-not is fun, if no one makes it work.
• Teach your child to use a camera. With digital ones, you can shoot, discuss, shoot….

Grow With the Flow pages 184-185

And of course, the next layer: Teachers have been taught to teach. Might it be better to help them learn to teach? I won’t ask if it might be better to help them learn to help kids learn – way too radical. And I’m not even imagining that I might ask if it would be better to help them learn to help kids learn to learn.

In spite of my tangential complaint, it’s a fine article – I hope to blog it here soon.

I’ve been talking about Mirror Neurons.

We’ve known since Condon and Sanders* that as mothers speak to their two-day old infant, the child moves in precise synchrony with the mother’s voice,and the mother dances along – they move together. Mirror neurons.

So picture a guy grocery shopping at the same time I was today. He’s carrying his infant as he shops, which seems like some good dad-kid time. The dad is talking animatedly. But not to the child. He’s on his cell phone.

Now, we’re all used to being around other people who are talking to someone else nearby. But I had to wonder: Here’s this little person, on his dad’s chest, hearing his dad’s voice and feeling the vibrations of the voice, and probably dancing along in perfect synchrony. But he’s dancing without a partner. There’s a person right there, but he isn’t talking to the kid, he’s just talking into the air. And his movements are wrong, they aren’t synchronized. Will the kid keep dancing?

He looked like a caring dad, and I bet the kid gets some good face time with him. But the old curmudgeon in me felt like I was looking at boot camp for a faceless society.

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

*Condon and Sanders showed that from the first days of life infants and their mothers “dance” together – the movements of mother and infant are intricately synchronized. Here’s a sample of their micro-analysis:

For example, as the adult emits the KK of “come,” which lasts for 0.07 second, the infant’s head moves right very slightly (Rvs), the left elbow extends slightly (Es), the right shoulder rotates outward slightly (ROs) the right hip rotates outward fast (ROf), the left hip extends slightly (Es), and the big toe of the left foot abducts (AD). These body parts sustain these directions and speeds of movement together for this 0.07-second interval. This forms a “unit” composed of the sustained relation of these movements of the body. … This 2-day-old infant displayed segments of movement synchronous with the adult’s speech during the entire 89-word sequence.

I first saw the article in Child Development

Condon, W. S. and Sander, L. W. (1974). Neonate movement is synchronized with adult speech. Integrated participation and language acquisition. Science 183:99

Condon describes some of his work, and the inferences he makes from it.

The quotation above is from what I take to be a privately sponsored website, which is the only online source I can find that quotes any of the original.

This topic continues at Mirror Neurons – 3.

This continues Mirror Neurons – 1.

Mirror Neurons and Parents
Caution: Rampant Speculation Ahead – Drive Carefully!

Do mirror neurons matter to you as a parent? Without knowing about them can you still help your child grow into a full, effective intelligence? Of course. We’ve been educating our kids fine without knowing about mirror neurons for quite a few million years. (We’ve had Dr. Spock to help us for the last millennium, but we even got along without him for a while.)

We’ve always acted as though we knew these circuits existed – that’s why we show our kids how to do things, and generally go to the trouble of teaching them. But being consciously aware of their existence and influence will help us direct our own efforts more skillfully, and dodge some strategies that come easily but work badly. I think awareness of these circuits changes the valence of many everyday experiences. I’m thinking my way into this as I write – this is brand new stuff – but it seems to me that understanding mirror neurons gives you a compass for much of child rearing.

Start from the potency these newly discovered circuits give to much behavior. Your child’s brain shares in the experiences of others: co-experiences. When she sees someone else do something, it’s not only that her brain observes, analyzes, learns how to do the same thing. Her brain does it. There must be evolutionary value to this response, which is more than a cognitive registering of the experience. These circuits developed because kids with a greater ability to imitate, model, and coexperience had a better chance of surviving and having kids who survived.

Mirror neurons are strong verification of the the philosophy I set out in Grow with the Flow. Here’s the core of the core, from my Credo:

Humans are born to be learners – it’s in our nature….
Kids learn because their brains are deeply structured to want and need to learn.

Grow With the Flow, p. 57
(The illustration on that page shows mirror neurons at work. Coincidence or prescience?)

Mirror neurons are the key to the intensity of human learning. Our brains’ urgent, deep-wired drive to share with others, to coexperience, is the basis for our automatic, prepotent inclination to learn by modeling. It is that wiring which makes cultural transmission possible. ("Cultural transmission” is everything we know that we didn’t have to figure out for ourselves.) Mirror neurons are a Rosetta Stone for much of the uniqueness and complexity of human behavior.

So How Can Mirror Neurons Help Parents?
A Potpourri of Speculations and Strategy Suggestions

• Kids are responding to you – they can hardly help it, the wiring is so strong. (Yes, this even applies to 15-year-olds. It’s just a bit more difficult to see.)

• What you say matters. What you do may matter even more. As I leaf through Grow With the Flow, Part 2: Theory into Practice, I’m finding it (hindsight is 20:20) gratifyingly easy to see mirror neurons everywhere. The common sense advice I give there seems to be strengthened and justified by this new discovery, We act as though mirror neuron circuits were our friends every time we show a child how to do something, explain what we’re doing, think about who he spends time with, model how to think creatively or critically, introduce new concepts or procedures, frame and interpret what she sees or hears.

• It’s critical to understand that mirror neurons generate a full-body response to our experiences. We think about our experiences. Some part of our brain does them. But we also feel them, and we feel our way into their meaning to us. Because of mirror neurons, we coexperience. When we see someone hurt, rejected, passionate, angry, we share in their emotion. When we see a beautiful dance or a home run, our motor circuits share the movement. This automatic, visceral response is a big part of what makes us such good learners. Understanding the body-based nature of responses to others helps us think about how to talk with our child so we’ll be heard well.

• It’s important to communicate with the correct part of the brain. When we are talking with our child about an issue, and we discuss, explain, argue our case, we’re trying to play to our child’s neocortex – appealing, through language, to reason and logic. But if the experience is visceral / emotional, we’re playing to an empty theater: The audience is downstairs in the emotional centers, having an experience. We’ve often described that as emotions clouding or blocking reason. It would be more accurate to say the experience is a holistic response that involves multiple brain systems.

  Take an example as simple as this: Your child has just seen someone on TV playing with a toy. He desperately wants the toy. Remember that he has just coexperienced playing with the toy. It was fun! (I plan to come back, in a third post, to this question of how advertisers and politicians may be able to manipulate us via mirror neuron circuits.)

  It seems likely that the first task is to open rational channels through response to the emotional ones. Help him learn to calm and soothe himself. Respect the emotions, and the wanting. (That doesn’t mean giving in to them. It means respecting his feelings at that moment.) Recognize that he wants the toy badly right now. The time to talk is later.

• Be clear that your child isn’t the only one with mirror neuron circuits. When the two of you talk, you are dancing together. His facial expressions, her tone of voice affect you. And vice versa. So often, kids will say “You yelled at me.” Their parent says “I never yelled at you.” They’re both right: The parent’s voice never rose, but they were frustrated, and the child empathized with the micro-signals of the parent’s frustration, read the underlying tone, vibrated with it, and felt the parent yelling.

  Ever find yourself, in moments of stress, falling back on exactly the strategies your parents used – the ones you promised yourself when you were 12 that you would never, ever use? I suspect mirror neurons have a lot to do with this – we’re having a coexperience with our child – our bodies responding to their signals, theirs to ours, and the whole mess spiraling downward, out of the thinking parts of our brain to the emotional parts and thence to strategies that were embedded when we were kids. We can learn to control those responses, but it isn’t automatic.

• I bet the frequent success of the Fay-Cline Love and Logic approach is because it gives everyone breathing room for the child to get back to rational thinking, and gives parents a way to stay there!

  Similarly, the Greene-Ablon Collaborative Problem Solving approach, the best new tool I’ve been given in years, seems to me to provide a process which exactly models what parents will do if they recognize the importance of mirror neurons.

• Mirror neurons seem likely to contribute to some of the bumpy roads of adolescence. Start from a hypothesis: Kids are likely to look to those who are most important to them for their models. Their mirror neuron circuits seem likely to respond most readily to their core social group. In early childhood, that’s parents, older siblings, and relatives. In adolescence – well, I don’t need to finish that sentence, do I? Ah, yes, and then there are hormones, and a still-developing frontal lobe. (I hope to talk someday about Jay Giedd’s revelatory work and its importance to parents.)

  I think the bumpy road of the teen years is at least partly as it needs to be. The business of adolescence is to move into the larger world as an independent entity – to finally cut the umbilical cord. But it does present us with some new challenges – ooops, new opportunities.

  Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop