4/5/98
    'BRAIN RESEARCH' CAN'T GUIDE EDUCATION 
    Scripps Howard News Service 
    Release date: Sunday, April 5, 1998 
    Colorado Springs may not use 
    Column 
    By LINDA SEEBACH 
    Scripps Howard News Service 
     
      Teachers hoping to learn something useful in the classroom throng to workshops on the latest ``brain research.'' All too often what they get is scientific-sounding patter about neurons and synapses that's really a sales pitch for some educational gimmick. 
     Politicians succumb, too, and base policy decisions on preposterous misunderstandings. When Gov. Roy Romer came to the News to talk about Colorado's reading tests, he told us that ``brain research'' showed early childhood education could increase adult intelligence by a third. 
     But the findings of brain research, called neuroscience, have very little to say about education, said John T. Bruer, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis. When a journalist asked him what advice he would give parents about choosing a pre-school based on what neuroscience has discovered about brain development, he answered, ``Based on neuroscience, absolutely nothing.'' 
     Critical periods, synapse formation, complex environments? As applied to education, it's folk theory, Bruer said in a talk to the Education Writers of America convention in San Francisco last week. 
     What's worse, he said, emphasis on the brain distracts educators from cognitive science, the study of the mind, which does have immediate practical application to teaching and learning (more on that in two articles of his on the foundation's Web site, jsmf.org). 
     Synapses are the electrical connections between nerve cells; any single cell may have thousands of them. The popular argument that we'll all be smarter if we can keep more synapses illustrates how folk theory goes astray.  
     Synapse formation in infants' brain is rapid. True, Bruer said. 
     From three to 10 years, children's brain have more synapses than at any other time in their lives. (True.) 
     Early experience protects synapses from elimination at puberty. (Possible.) 
     The time of rapid growth is a critical period, the optimal time for learning. (Highly questionable.) 
     Enriched environments are most beneficial during that time. (Almost certainly false.) 
     Isn't it obvious that more synapses are better? No, Bruer said; in fact, the failure to prune unnecessary neural connections is associated with certain forms of mental illness. 
     The density of synapses rises rapidly from birth to about age 3, stays high until about age 10, and then declines through adolescence until it reaches approximately the same level as at birth. No one would accept that chronology as a description of human intellectual growth. 
     Moreover, the pattern of rapid synapse growth followed by pruning is one humans share with many other species. It's adapted to the environments in which children or young are raised, but only in very general ways _ visual input, the ability to move and manipulate objects, noises, speech sounds. 
     ``These kinds of stimuli are available in any child's environment, unless that child is abused to the point of being raised in a sensory deprivation chamber,'' Bruer wrote. 
     Given the cultural diversity of child-rearing practices around the world, he said, ``if infants really needed highly specific experience to become normal adults, the human race would be extinct.'' 
     The belief that there are certain critical periods for development, like windows that will slam shut, rests on experiments with kittens. If their eyes were sewn shut at crucial times, they would never be able to see properly. 
     Even for the kittens, that's an oversimplification. They could learn to use their eyes if trained. The more important fact, though, is that kittens' vision is a basic function of the sensory system, biologically programmed to happen at a certain age. Extrapolating from that experiment to, say, the choice of preschools, is ``a bridge too far,'' Bruer says. 
     But, he adds, it does have one important implication for early childhood care. Parents and teachers must identify and treat sensory problems _ cataracts, chronic ear infections _ as early as possible, and then provide therapy so children can regain normal function. 
     The idea that enriched environments develop better brains comes from experiments suggesting that rats raised in a complex environment learn better (and have more synapses). That effect, however, is not a critical-period effect; it applies to rats of any age. Like humans, rats continue to learn things (and form new synapses) all their lives. 
     Furthermore, a complex environment for a laboratory rat is one which comes closer to being a rat in the wild, interacting with other rats, instead of being alone in a cage. Children raised alone in a cage probably wouldn't do well either, but since that's not a choice we're considering, the relevance of the experiment is doubtful. 
     Politics creeps in when advocates talk about children instead of rats. An enriched environment is ``very much in the eye of the beholder, often reflecting the beholder's cultural and class values,'' Bruer says. 
     For the difficult questions of what and how we should teach, neuroscience offers little guidance. Teachers should bring a large measure of skepticism with them to those workshops.