A CAUTIONARY NOTE ON BRAIN RESEARCH

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In recent years, news about the brain has been all over the popular press and education journals. Brain fever has spread through the ranks of educators, early childhood advocates, and those with a sales pitch. We've heard a lot about brain plasticity, dendrites, neural connections, and "brain-based learning."

Some have asserted that brain research supports playing Mozart to babies, increasing funding for early childhood programs, using particular teaching strategies or curricula, or timing certain learning experiences around "windows of opportunity" when the brain is most receptive to them. Assertions like these are pinned on research findings such as the following: the density of synapses (connections between neurons which create pathways in the brain) is highest around age three or four and begins to decline around age nine: the left and right hemispheres of the brain process different types of tasks; and "enriched" environments early in life stimulate the formation of synapses, improving the ability to do certain tasks.

But there's disagreement over what the research implies about teaching, learning, and public policy. Early movement experiences, for instance, help wire the brain for motor control. And, like other experiences they may stimulate the young brain to produce more synapses. Does this mean that children who have better body balance will learn math more easily? as the owner of a children's fitness center stated in U.S. News & World Report. Does this mean that there are specific exercises that at any age can "develop the brain's neural pathways," and "integrate the brain's deeper structures" and thereby "bring about rapid and often dramatic improvements in concentration, memory, reading, writing, organizing, listening, physical coordination, and more," as one trademarked training program claims.

"I see a lot of dramatic kinds of marketing because of brain research." says Carl Gabbard, Professor of Motor Development at Texas A & M University and past President of the National Association of Sport and Physical Education, who is skeptical of such extreme claims. Physical activity is indeed good for brain development but the effect is general rather than specific, he explains. General physical activity stimulates brain development because it supplies the brain with glucose, its main energy source. However, "[A]t this point it is still quite unclear as to the specific types and amounts of experience necessary to stimulate the formation of particular neural connections," he cautions in an article in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance.

—Catherine Paglin

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