Childhood stimulation key to brain development, study finds

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/14/childhood-stimulation-key-brain-development


Brain scans of participants aged in their late teens showed a correlation between cognitive stimulation at the age of four and a thinner, more developed, cortex Photograph: David Job/Getty Images

An early childhood surrounded by books and educational toys will leave positive fingerprints on a person's brain well into their late teens, a two-decade-long research study has shown.

Scientists found that the more mental stimulation a child gets around the age of four, the more developed the parts of their brains dedicated to language and cognition will be in the decades ahead.

It is known that childhood experience influences brain development but the only evidence scientists have had for this has usually come from extreme cases such as children who had been abused or suffered trauma. Martha Farah, director of the centre for neuroscience and society at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the latest study, wanted to find out how a normal range of experiences in childhood might influence the development of the brain.

Farah took data from surveys of home life and brain scans of 64 participants carried out over the course of 20 years. Her results, presented on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, showed that cognitive stimulation from parents at the age of four was the key factor in predicting the development of several parts of the cortex – the layer of grey matter on the outside of the brain – 15 years later.

[bemildred]

1. I don't think you need a brain scan to know this.

Still, more evidence is good.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Now we need a study relating the cortical differences

to differences in measured abilities, particularly executive functions.


Most street criminals, in my experience as a Corrections psychologist, have impaired cortical executive functions (functions needed to appropriately initiate, sustain, inhibit or switch activities) and come from massively pathological childhood situations.

How much cortical impairment does it take to constitute a Diminished Capacity or "Not Guilty by Reason of Mental Disease or Defect" defense?

[bemildred]

3. Yep, "no self-control", in other words.

That is a learned and accrued skill, telling yourself "NO!" when you need to.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. It may also result from frontal & prefrontal cortical problems.

However, for many, I think learning to "shut off" your frontal cortical functions is a learned skill.

For example, if you life is just too miserable for you to tolerate being present in it, you may learn to dissociate, etc. In fact, this produces a "learned" form of ADD (which is also a frontal deactivation problem).

[bemildred]

5. Quite true.

Although training can help, if done right, where normal mental functions are not all available. But that's still a big problem.

Violating social taboos and conventions will not serve you well, no matter how irrational they are; so I consider that it is a social necessity to be able to tell your higher intelligence to shut up, a matter of survival. I know I learned really early on not to say what I really think unless I know who I am talking to.

[hedgehog]

7. That's a dangerous path to go down -

when does a judgment of "not guilty by reason of mental defect or disease" mean a life time commitment to a hospital for the criminally insane?

[Jackpine Radical]

8. You would rather put a psychotic person in prison for life?

Commitments can take many forms including options like community placement, and are medically & psychologically reviewed every year.

[hedgehog]

9. Given that we are currently using prisons to house a large number of the mentally ill,

commitment to a hospital would be an improvement. But we are already incarcerating a large number of black men; we need to be careful that we don't end up calling some of these men mentally ill and incarcerating them for life without parole.

[Chemisse]

6. This headline could have been written 30 years ago - and in fact it was!

Of course the evidence to support it is a lot more sophisticated.

[Jackpine Radical]

10. More than 50 years ago.

I recall writings by people like J. McV. Hunt saying the same thing.