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Sarah Eeee

*A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing*: What Mirror Images and Foreign Scripts Tell Us A... - 0 views

blog.liviablackburne.com/...mages-and-foreign-scripts.html

psychology neuroscience reading research

shared by Sarah Eeee on 22 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • For most adults in literate countries, reading is so well practiced that it’s reflexive. If the words are there, it's impossible not to read.
  • If you raise a child on a desert island, he'll learn to eat, walk, and sleep, but odds are he won't spontaneously pick up a stick and start writing. For most of human history, written language didn't even exist. Reading as a cultural invention has only been around for a few thousand years, a snap of a finger in evolutionary terms.
  • we’re very good at seeing, and the trick is just to retune that machinery to the demands of reading.
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  • But even on a basic visual level, we have to somewhat reprogram our visual systems.
  • Mirror invariance, the idea that something flipped sideways is still the same object, is a core property of our visual systems, and for good reason.
  • What's the mirror image of b? Now it's a completely different letter: d.
  • Mirror reversal is overwhelmingly common in beginning writers, from the occasional flipped letter to whole words written as a mirror image. Kids do this spontaneously. They never actually see flipped letters in the world around them. It's as if their brains are too powerful for the task.
  • With practice however, we do retrain our brains to read
  • Does the brain of a reader look different from that of a nonreader?
  • Since blood flow is tied to brain activity, fMRI allows us to see the patches of brain involved in different tasks.
    • Sarah Eeee
      Sarah Eeee on 22 Dec 10
       
      Bit of an oversimplification, no?
  • They found that most participants did indeed have a brain region that responded more to words than objects.
  • This is rather remarkable, that the brain would develop a specialized area for an artificial category of images.
  • need more proof that this region developed as a result of learning to read.
  • If reading experience does alter the brain, you would expect English readers and English/Hebrew readers to have different brain responses to Hebrew. And this is indeed what Baker found. The bilingual readers had high activation for both Hebrew and English in their word region, while monolingual English readers only had high activation for English.
  • Sarah Eeee on 22 Dec 10
     
    Interesting & quick post on research into the neurological basis of reading.
nat bas

Understanding the Anxious Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...04anxiety-t.html

anxiety psychology brain emotional_control

shared by nat bas on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.
  • Four significant long-term longitudinal studies are now under way: two at Harvard that Kagan initiated, two more at the University of Maryland under the direction of Nathan Fox, a former graduate student of Kagan’s. With slight variations, they all have reached similar conclusions: that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious.
  • In the brain, these thoughts can often be traced to overreactivity in the amygdala, a small site in the middle of the brain that, among its many other functions, responds to novelty and threat. When the amygdala works as it should, it orchestrates a physiological response to changes in the environment. That response includes heightened memory for emotional experiences and the familiar chest pounding of fight or flight. But in people born with a particular brain circuitry, the kind seen in Kagan’s high-reactive study subjects, the amygdala is hyperreactive, prickly as a haywire motion-detector light that turns on when nothing’s moving but the rain. Other physiological changes exist in children with this temperament, many of them also related to hyperreactivity in the amygdala. They have a tendency to more activity in the right hemisphere, the half of the brain associated with negative mood and anxiety; greater increases in heart rate and pupil dilation in response to stress; and on occasion higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.
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  • The physiological measurements led them to believe something biological was at work. Their hypothesis: the inhibited children were “born with a lower threshold” for arousal of various brain regions, in particular the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the circuit responsible for the stress hormone cortisol.
  • At age 4, children who had been high-reactive were four times as likely to be behaviorally inhibited as those who had been low-reactive. By age 7, almost half of the jittery babies had developed symptoms of anxiety — fear of thunder or dogs or darkness, extreme shyness in the classroom or playground — compared with just 10 percent of the more easygoing ones. About one in five of the high-reactive babies were consistently inhibited and fearful at every visit up to the age of 7.
  • By adolescence, the rate of anxiety in Kagan’s study subjects declined overall, including in the high-risk group. At 15, about two-thirds of those who had been high-reactors in infancy behaved pretty much like everybody else.
  • PEOPLE WITH A nervous temperament don’t usually get off so easily, Kagan and his colleagues have found. There exists a kind of sub-rosa anxiety, a secret stash of worries that continue to plague a subset of high-reactive people no matter how well they function outwardly. They cannot quite outrun their own natures: consciously or unconsciously, they remain the same uneasy people they were when they were little.
  • Teenagers who were in the group at low risk for anxiety showed no increase in activity in the amygdala when they looked at the face, even if they had been told to focus on their own fear. But those in the high-risk group showed increased activity in the amygdala when they were thinking about their own feelings (though not when they were thinking about the nose). Once again, this pattern was seen in anxiety-prone youngsters quite apart from whether they had problems with anxiety in their daily lives. In the high-risk kids, even those who were apparently calm in most settings, their amygdalas lighted up more than the others’ did.
  • Behaviorally inhibited children were much more likely to have older siblings: two-thirds of them did, compared with just one-third of the uninhibited children. Could having older siblings, he and his co-authors wondered, mean being teased and pushed, which becomes a source of chronic stress, which in turn amplifies a biological predisposition to inhibition?
  • high-reactive babies who went to day care when they were young were significantly less fearful at age 4 than were the high-reactives who stayed home with their mothers.
  • The predictive power of an anxiety-prone temperament, such as it is, essentially works in just one direction: not by predicting what these children will become but by predicting what they will not. In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold. Still, while a Sylvia Plath almost certainly won’t grow up to be a Bill Clinton, she can either grow up to be anxious and suicidal, or simply a poet. Temperament is important, but life intervenes.
  • nat bas on 03 Oct 09
     
    This is a good article that looks at how anxiety happens- it is more or less something you are born with, but you learn to live with, if you are intelligent about it. Liked it. Good writing.
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