What a complex post! I think this is a hugely important topic for parents, and I hope this first installment communicates that to you. I’m going to post the first hunk, and see whether I can eventually knead the rest of it into something loaf shaped.

How can I communicate to you that there’s been a huge new discovery – possibly the most important about the human brain in these recent decades of unparalleled discoveries – one that fundamentally advances our understanding of what it is to be human and how it is that we can be human?

Mirror Neurons – A Primer

The idea is deceptively simple; the trick is to see that the simple idea may come closer to the core of what makes us human than anything – even language. And the most astonishing thing is that we’ve just begun to be aware that this function exists – an enormously important class of brain circuitry of which we were completely unaware.

As you know, when we do or think anything, there must be a corresponding pattern of brain activation. With functional neuroimaging we’re able to watch those patterns in real time – portions of the brain “light up” as we act or think. If you lick an ice cream cone, there will be a unique expression of brain activity which corresponds to your actions.

Now imagine that you watch someone else lick an ice cream cone. Your brain lights up as if you were licking the ice cream cone. You don’t make the action. But your brain “goes through the motions.” Or imagine that you see a hand reach out to caress someone, and see the hand rudely repulsed. Your brain lights up as though it had just undergone that rejection. Your brain automatically shares the experiences of others. Shades of sci-fi: We’re talking mind melds.

We know we’re wired to attend to and respond to the behaviors, the examples, the models of others. But this is a big new step: we are also wired to reflect those experiences internally, to live some part of others’ experience inside our brains. We do it automatically. We do it out of awareness. We don’t merely respond cognitively ("He’s licking an ice cream cone.") Our bodies respond to the experiences of others – “we feel it in our gut.” We share the experience by doing in our brain an imitation of what we see being done, and of the emotions that accompany the action. Researchers have posited that mirror neurons may play an essential role in:

• Empathy – understanding others’ feelings; experiencing the social emotions that allow us to co-exist; understanding social meanings. (Mirror neurons may be what’s “broken” in autism.)
• Understanding someone’s intentions – internally predicting what they’re about to do
• Learning by imitation and modeling – likely language, probably all the learning that represents cultural transmission. Translate that: Everything you hope you or others will teach your child – or that you fear your child will learn.
• Our emotional response to violence, visual art, dance, TV sports, music, video games….
• The bond between mother and child (my wild-eyed extension of the finding that babies imitate from the first hour of life)
• The evolution of human culture and the transmission of culture across generations – or, if you prefer, the ability to escape the time scale of biological evolution, whether or not that turns out to have been a good idea.

Sound like something a parent should know about?

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

If You’d Like To Learn More

A New York Times article from January 10 of this year, by the excellent science writer, Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds,” provides an excellent introduction, and prompted me to get at this post. [Gotta add a caveat here: the article made the McDonnell Foundation’s “Bad Neuro-Journalism” hit list for its homuncular treatment of neurons. It’s a sort of distinction, like being lambasted on “The Daily Show."]

Perhaps the best overall introduction is PBS’s NOVA Science Now – Mirror Neurons. The location includes their original 14-minute broadcast segment, which means you can hear some of the researchers mentioned here, and watch some of the research involved. The best watching in this sequence is to watch yourself: Notice how you react to some of the scenes? Mirror neurons.

A short version, from another excellent science writer, Sharon Begley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, “How ‘mirror neurons’ help us to empathize” and referenced here from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com site.

Here’s a much-noticed speculative essay by V. S. Ramachandran on the potential significance of mirror neurons. He calls the discovery of mirror neurons “the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

From the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology, here are three short articles on mirror neurons which review Ramachandran’s ideas and offer a variety of research references.

One of the intriguing speculations that has come from this work is that primary characteristics of autism may result from mirror neuron defects. This brief report from Scientific American notes that autistic children show reduced activation of mirror neuron areas when they look at photos of faces, and that, importantly, the degree of activation seems to correlate with the level of a child’s social ability. I’m captivated by a phrase in this abstract from an article. “Imitation, mirror neurons and autism,” which appeared in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Review: “These neurons show activity in relation both to specific actions performed by self and matching actions performed by others, providing a potential bridge between minds” (my emphasis).

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

You can now order Grow With the Flow with a credit card through a secure online connection at our online store.

Exciting times!

I’ve had some great feedback on the book in the last few days – you can imagine how thrilling it is for me when people say it’s really helping them. I believe in the book, and to have others affirm its value to them feels mighty good.

Our first online customers are also very positive about how easy the ordering process is – I’m hearing that it’s a simple checkout to use, that delivery time is good, and that having a copy of the book “in your hand” (and an easy way to give a copy to a friend) feels terrific.

You may remember that the books are hand wrapped and shipped from my sister’s small independent book store. Personally, I always love getting a package from the Erie Book Store: She uses this great, old-fashioned wrapping paper, and it makes a shipment feel like a gift.

Thanks to Paul for persevering patiently with the last details*, and to Theresa at PayPal, who gave good help with the final steps to make the site secure and easy to use.

* You know the old engineering joke: “The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the job takes the second 90% of the time.”

Maps — Some tools seem to be able to take you anywhere — to support the development of almost every intelligence. Maybe anything can, approached with enough creativity, but it’s easy with maps. Of course they’re about Visual-Spatial intelligence. When you learn to look at a map and picture the place it represents, your brain has developed an astonishingly complex symbolizing power. But maps go far beyond their visual-spatial core. They’re a gateway to geography, geology, history, anthropology, economics, politics — to so many branches of Knowledge-Based Intelligence. They’re an introduction to all the forms in which we represent data visually and to the different data that can be represented in the same form, as when we compare a map of land forms to one of agricultural products. They are tools for creativity, for imagined or imaginary voyages. They are a tool for the Director when we plan a trip from here to there on the map. If your child really gets into maps, check out the stunning work of Edwin Raisz. And thanks, Mom, for papering my bedroom with old National Geographic maps. The voyages I made looking at those as I fell asleep!

Grow With the Flow p 176

Concerning maps as a gateway to history, i just found a delightful resource: the Library of Congress searchable online collection of historical maps.

Here’s where I grew up. (It’s the second house down from the Episcopal church ("B"), on S. Pearl St. Those National Geographic maps papered the room inside the leftmost second-story window.

Here’s where I live now. Our house wasn’t built for another 40 years, and even my street is off in the distance from the downtown of 1899, but I can see where my office will be, once they build it.

Do they have a map of your hometown?

Treating and Preventing
Adolescent Mental Health Disorders:
What We Know and What We Don’t Know
A Research Agenda for Improving the Mental Health of Our Youth

and

If Your Adolescent has…

Oxford University Press

In my private practice I focus on the themes of Grow With the Flow – issues of learning and cognition: helping people learn, think, plan, organize, and problem solve. If that sounds like I don’t need to be concerned with emotions, forget it – all learning is intimately tied to emotions, and when learning fails, emotions are more likely to be at the base than cognitive factors.

Students who are dealing with a mental health disorder are unlikely to focus effectively on studies, no matter how hard they try. It’s critical to deal with those emotional issues, and not to be sidetracked by the obvious learning issue. A junior high student is failing all her classes because she’s too depressed to do school. To push her to get her grades back up will be to miss the point. This is the more true because there’s a double whammy involved: Not only does her depression block learning directly, but the consequences of failing to perform to expectations is very likely to cycle back into the emotions and start a feedback loop – a nosedive.

The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, recognizing that adolescent mental health disorders have become a major public health issue, has launched The Adolescent Mental Health Initiative to find out what we know and what we need to know in order to diagnose and treat adolescents who suffer major mental-health disorders, and to help bring them to successful adult lives.

One product of the initiative is a series of parent resource guides to specific disorders, backed by a weighty handbook for professionals. (Yes! I had to know. It weighs in at 1.954 kg.) The parent resources are distilled from the reference work, which in turn was developed with the assistance of over 100 well-respected psychologists and psychiatrists.

The reference work for mental health professionals, Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders: What We Know and What We Don’t Know carries the additional subtitle “A Research Agenda for Improving the Mental Health of Our Youth.”

I’m going to tackle the big book, which looks like a benchmark resource for mental health professionals. But I’m not sure I should post about it here, on a site that’s mostly about learning. Please let me know what you think: Should I post on mental health as it relates to learning, or is that too far from the focus of Grow With the Flow?

The project also has a web site for teens, copecaredeal.

Do kids still say that? At this point, I don’t even remember for sure whether we said it when I was a kid, back when dinosaurs roamed and I believed all adults were always truthful.

But I know that parents say it a lot: Call their kid a liar. Do it in ways that humiliate. Accuse casually, quite certain that they have a straight line of sight into their child’s psyche. Assume the very worst motives. Punish.

it sometimes turns out that there was no lie at all, at least from the child’s point of view: a confusion, a misunderstanding, forgetfulness. Opportunities to work on communications.

If there was a lie, I ask parents to look at its nature and context. Was it a manipulative lie, one designed to get someone else in trouble? Once in a while it is. It’s important to understand what prompted it. Often, there were felt pressures or injustices. Once in a great while – I see it maybe once or twice a decade – it’s a purely manipulative, hateful, Machiavellian lie, with no goal but to hurt – no source, no “reason,” no remorse, however carefully I dig for it. Then I worry.

Somewhere above 99% of the time, it’s a defensive lie – a CYA lie. “The dog ate my homework.”

CYA Lie : What’s important :: Barometer : Weather

You don’t punish the barometer when it says a storm is coming, you change your picnic plans. The lie is a symptom, an indicator, a pointer. To even think of it as a lie takes you in the wrong direction. It’s an invitation to problem solving. The relevant questions may be ones like:
“Why is there so much heat about homework my child can’t deal with it straight up?”
“Where’s the fear?”
“What are the emotions behind the lie?”
“What are the misconceptions behind the lie? Am I certain they really are misconceptions?”
“How can I help him talk about what’s going on?”
“What’s my most important goal right now?

I search my memory, and I can’t think of a single time that focusing on the lie – the fact of the prevarication –has helped. Ask yourself: “Am I a criminal investigator or a parent?”
Ask yourself: “How can I help my child?”
When the lies stop, you’ve solved a problem. Lucky the lie was there to let you know you had a problem – the smell of gas that headed off a nasty explosion.

The impetus for this post came from a New York Times Magazine feature , “Looking for the Lie,” February 5, 2006, by Robin Marantz Henig.

It seems possible that music may turn out to be more central, more pervasive in its influence, more fundamental to us as humans than we now realize. I wonder whether the music of our own body and our mother’s body — the first sounds we hear — may resonate within us in profound and still-unknown ways. I wonder why so many mathematically capable people also have a deep relation to music. I still wonder, thanks to Hank Cross, my much-valued mentor, why rats apparently perceive octaves. I wonder why the need to tap our feet is so strong. I wonder why music soothes the savage beast.

Grow With the Flow page 70

Community Choruses: Singing and Happiness
Singing loud with others makes us happy.

Blast from the past
It may be because of leftover fish-ear parts.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll: Or on the evolutionary neurobiology of hearing and hedonism
So if you thought there was something fishy about Country Joe…

Jeremy’s mom comes in to find him still doing homework; he never finishes before midnight.

“How do they expect you to learn anything in class if you’re exhausted from doing homework all night?”

“You don’t go to class to learn. You go to class to get your homework assignment.”

Zits, 1/5/06

Vacation’s almost over – Paul will head back to the Twin Cities, Andy to New Haven – so it wasn’t surprising when the old Brio set came out last night. Nor was it surprising, when the first layout we designed proved not to allow a train to get everywhere from everywhere, in either direction, that a discussion of graph theory ensued. (As you see, the discusison led to a couple improved layouts.)

I don’t have the math to understand much of the conversation, which was still going on when I went to bed. What I could understand was that skills developed in childhood play – skills of planning, analysis, problem solving, patience, and flexibility; skills of communication, cooperation, playfulness, and creativity – had flowed seamlessly into adulthood.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
Marie Curie

Imagination is more important than knowledge…
Albert Einstein

I resolve to

• believe that my child and I are always on the same side.
• trust that my child knows what’s best for her.
• remember that children model better than they listen.
• assume that if an activity is valuable to my child, it is valuable for my child, if I can only see why.
• ask “Why not?” more than I ask “Why?”
• believe that my child will do it if she can do it.
• believe, even in the face of short-term evidence, that my support and approval are among my child’s most important goals.
• look at what’s right, not what’s wrong.
• defend my child when his instincts are right; take a stand against any system that is looking more to its goals than to my child’s.
• take a flame thrower to every unworthy homework assignment that crosses my doorstep.

Happy New Year!

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self reliance.”

Merlyn, in The Sword in the Stone
(p. 53 of my edition)