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Excerpts from "Your Child's Brain"
Newsweek Cover Story, February 1996, A baby's brain is a work in progress, trillions of neutrons are waiting to be wired into a mind. The experiences of childhood, pioneering research shows, help form the brain's circuits-for music and math, language and emotion. "If you're working with little kids you're not going to teach them higher mathematics or chess. But they are interested in and can process music." Researchers gave 19 pre-schoolers piano or singing lessons. After eight months, the researchers found, the children "dramatically improved in spatial reasoning," compared with children given no music lessons, as shown in their ability to work mazes, draw geometric figures and copy patterns of two-colour blocks. The mechanism behind the "Mozart effect" remains murky, but Shaw suspects that when children exercise cortical neurons by listening to classical music, they are also strengthening circuits used for mathematics. Music, says the UC team, "excites the inherent brain patterns and enhances their use in complex reasoning tasks." What does it mean to "educate" a 4-month-old? Nothing fancy: blocks, beads, talking to him, playing games such as peek-a-boo. As outlined in the book "Learningames" each of the 200-odd activities was designed to enhance cognitive, language, social or motor development. In a recent paper, Ramey and Frances Campbell of the University of North Carolina report that children enrolled in early childhood learning as pre-schoolers still scored higher in math and reading at the age of 15 than untreated children. The children still retained an average IQ edge of 4.6 points. The earlier the children were enrolled, the more enduring the gain. |