For ADHD Children, Mother’s Depression, Early Parenting Predict Conduct Problems

Posted by on April 22nd, 2007 | Comments off

ADHD and
Behavioral Problems

According to a study published in the January 2007 issue of the American Psychological Association’s journal, Developmental Psychology, a mother’s depression predicts whether children with ADHD will develop behavioral problems.

Psychology professor Andrea Chronis, director of the University of Maryland ADHD Program and lead author on the paper said, “In the real world, this could have important implications, because research has suggested that children with both ADHD and conduct problems are at the greatest risk of becoming chronic criminal offenders.”

As I’ve discussed in many previous blogs, the brain is quite plastic almost to a flaw; negative stimulation, will affect the brain negatively while positive stimulation will affect the brain positively. This study seems to reflect that fact as well. The researchers found that positive parenting during preschool years predicted fewer behavioral problems as the children reached early adolescence. Children presented fewer conduct problems such as lying, fighting, bullying and stealing. Conversely, maternal depression predicted more conduct problems during adolescence.

The researchers estimate, approximately 20 to 50 percent of children and 44 to 50 percent of adolescents with ADHD experience severe conduct problems.

“Parenting an ADHD child is very difficult for many families,” Chronis says [see ADHD and Alcohol Abuse]. Chronis’ team has found in earlier research that mothers of ADHD children are at double the risk of experiencing depression than moms of non-ADHD kids. Focus was place on mothers as they are frequently the primary caregivers and are therefore subject to more stress and depression. “Often there’s a growing cycle of negativity as parents’ nerves fray and their children’s behavior escalates in response to increasingly harsh or withdrawn parenting. Maternal depression makes parenting a child with ADHD even more challenging. Now we have new evidence that praise, a warm tone of voice and use of other positive parenting techniques may help break this dangerous cycle.”

Chronis’ research is part of an ongoing longitudinal study funded by the NIH that follows ADHD children through their 18th birthdays. Collaborating with research teams at the Universities of Chicago and Pittsburgh, the study evaluated the behavior and development of 108 children whose ages ranged from four to seven at the study’s beginning. Parenting techniques were assessed by observation, and data on the mother’s mental health were analyzed annually.

Neuroplasticity at work: the researchers found that children with mothers who displayed the highest levels of positive parenting during preschool had significantly lower levels of conduct problems over time while children of previously depressed mothers had significantly higher levels of conduct problems over time.

As I mentioned in ADHD and Alcohol Abuse, the problems of depression and alcohol abuse may be parental coping mechanisms in response to an ADHD child. They are also quite likely cyclic; the child is more likely to be depressed or abuse alcohol later in life.

This does give us a background to develop a methodology to prevent the cycle from recurring.

For ADHD Children, Mother’s Depression, Early Parenting Predict Conduct Problems

COLLEGE PARK, Md., March 22 (AScribe Newswire) – A mother’s depression predicts whether children with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) will develop conduct problems such as lying, fighting, bullying and stealing, according to a new study from a University of Maryland researcher.

The study, published in the January 2007 issue of the American Psychological Association’s journal, “Developmental Psychology,” also found that early positive parenting during the preschool years predicted fewer conduct problems as the children grew to early adolescence. The strength of the findings led the researchers to conclude that maternal depression may be a risk factor, whereas positive parenting may be a protective factor.

“This research gives us clear targets for early intervention to prevent conduct problems in children with ADHD,” says Andrea Chronis, director of the University of Maryland ADHD Program and professor of psychology who served as lead author on the paper. “In the real world, this could have important implications, because research has suggested that children with both ADHD and conduct problems are at the greatest risk of becoming chronic criminal offenders.”

The researchers say their study is the first to focus directly on the role of parent mental health and early parenting in the development of conduct problems among children with ADHD. Moreover, they point to previous research that shows the development of conduct problems to be quite common in children with ADHD. By one estimate, approximately 20 to 50 percent of children and 44 to 50 percent of adolescents with ADHD experience severe conduct problems.

“Parenting an ADHD child is very difficult for many families,” Chronis says. “Often there’s a growing cycle of negativity as parents’ nerves fray and their children’s behavior escalates in response to increasingly harsh or withdrawn parenting. Maternal depression makes parenting a child with ADHD even more challenging. Now we have new evidence that praise, a warm tone of voice and use of other positive parenting techniques may help break this dangerous cycle.”

Findings and Method

Specifically, the researchers found that children with mothers who displayed the highest levels of positive parenting during preschool had significantly lower levels of conduct problems over time, when other possible contributing factors were controlled. Also, children of previously depressed mothers had significantly higher levels of conduct problems over time compared to children whose mothers had never been depressed.

This research is part of an ongoing longitudinal study funded by the National Institutes of Health that follows ADHD children through their 18th birthday. Conducted by members of the research team at the Universities of Chicago and Pittsburgh, it consisted of a series of annual assessments of 108 children’s behavior and development. Children ranged in age from four to seven at the start of the research. The parenting techniques were assessed using observational methodology during the first year of the study. Information on the mother’s mental health was also collected annually.

The study focused on the mothers’ health and parenting since they are most often the primary caretakers and are more likely to be depressed than men. Also, an earlier study by Chronis and the research team found that mothers of ADHD children are at double the risk of experiencing depression than moms of non-ADHD kids.

With a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, Chronis and her research team at the University of Maryland are now developing and evaluating a 14-week behavioral intervention for depressed mothers of children with ADHD that targets effective parenting and reducing maternal depression.

An electronic copy of the research paper is available to journalists. Please email Neil Tickner: ntickner@umd.edu.

The Maryland ADHD Program is a clinical research program with a strong commitment to conducting clinical research that advances knowledge of the assessment and treatment of ADHD, provides comprehensive, empirically-based assessment and treatment of ADHD and associated behavior problems, trains the next generation of child clinical psychologists in these practices and educates parents and schools in this form of assessment and treatment. More information is available online: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/clinicalpsyc/training/adhd.htm.

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Video Games and Brain Development

Posted by on August 16th, 2005 | Comments off

Recently, Scott Bauer of the Associated Press (July 27, 2005) released an article entitled: Blind Teen Amazes With Video-Game Skills.

In it, Bauer writes of super video game whiz, Brice Mellen. Brice is super proficient in games such as Mortal Kombat and others. The only difference between Brice and his peers is that Brice is blind. The following excerpt is from the article and is an exceptional example of neuroplasticity or Brice’s ability (his brain’s ability) to compensate for his loss of sight.

And as he easily dispatched foes who took him on recently at a Lincoln gaming center, the affable and smiling Mellen remained humble.

“I can’t say that I’m a superpro,” he said, working the controller like an extension of his body. “I can be beat.”

Those bold enough to challenge him weren’t so lucky. One by one, while playing “Soul Caliber 2,” their video characters were decapitated, eviscerated and gutted without mercy by Mellen’s on-screen alter ego.

“I’m getting bored,” Mellen said in jest as he won game after game.

Blind since birth when his optic nerve didn’t connect because of Leber’s disease, Mellen honed his video game skills over the years through patient and not-so-patient playing, memorizing key joystick operations and moves in certain games, asking lots of questions and paying particular attention to audio cues. He worked his way up from games such as “Space Invaders” and “Asteroid,” onto the modern combat games.

“I guess I don’t know how I do it, really,” Mellen said, as he continued playing while facing away from the screen. “It’s beyond me.”

Mellen knows this much: He started playing at home when he was about 7.”

Brice has learned how to control play through adaptation. He can play with his back to the screen and use finely tuned listening skills to calculate distance and position. Applying this with exquisitely tuned kinesthetic skills on the joystick, and he has a powerful combination that few can beat.

His mastery is a mystery; however, it is a true example of the human brain’s ability to adapt when given the correct stimulation and learning environment. It remains unfortunate, at the time of this blog, that science has yet to catch up or tap into the immense innate capacity of the human brain.

When I developed Play Attention, I was acutely aware that cognitive training/development through video game usage was an incredibly motivating discipline. The intrinsic interest in computer video gaming provides a tremendous teaching environment.

Off-the-shelf commercial video games provide little cognitive improvement, if any according to recent research. They do teach the user to identify screen objects quickly and accurately. They may quite likely decrease one’s ability to control sustained attention, impulsivity, and aggression as well.

Thus, it is imperative to provide specific goals for game play. Play Attention teaches and increases specific cognitive skills typically deficit in persons with attention problems. I systematically structure the teaching/learning process to produce cognitive and behavioral changes. This, of course, does not happen in off-the-shelf games where violence is the objective. It is important to remember that our brains are ALWAYS affected by what we input into them.

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Training the Brain: Cognitive Therapy As An Alternative To ADHD Drugs

Posted by on July 25th, 2005 | No Comments

I have written for years that only by redefining ADHD can we address the problem through education and training. Finally, the movement is approaching mainstream as indicated in the article from Scientific American entitled, Training the Brain, Cognitive Therapy As An Alternative To ADHD Drugs.

It is interesting to note that the techniques mentioned in the article have been incorporated in the Play Attention cognitive tools for about ten years.

“Recent studies support the notion that many children with ADHD have cognitive deficits, specifically in working memory–the ability to hold in mind information that guides behavior. The cognitive problem manifests behaviorally as inattention and contributes to poor academic performance. Such research not only questions the value of medicating ADHD children, it also is redefining the disorder and leading to more meaningful treatment that includes cognitive training.”

Salient issues raised by the author include:

1. The difficult decision by parents “To medicate or not? Millions of parents must decide when their child is diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)–a decision made tougher by controversy.”
2. While medication may calm a student’s outward behavior, research shows that it does not increase cognitive ability manifesting in improved academic performance, social relationships, or defiant behavior over the long-term.
3. This has led scientists to research effective means of cognitive training as a substitute.

This is really a shift in our understanding of this disorder from behavioral to biological,” states Rosemary Tannock, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Tannock has shown that although stimulant medication improves working memory, the effect is small, she says, “suggesting that medication isn’t going to be sufficient.” So she and others, such as Susan Gathercole of the University of Durham in England, now work with schools to introduce teaching methods that train working memory. In fact, working-memory deficits may underlie several disabilities, not just ADHD, highlighting the heterogeneity of the disorder.”

The article focuses on Dr. Torkel Klingberg of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden who trained around 40 kids with ADHD with a software program that addressed “working memory.” After more than 20 days of training parents reported that their children had greatly improved attention and lessened hyperactivity.

Klingberg essentially proved that cognitive retraining improved neurobiological function. This work has been underway with Play Attention since 1994. It’s good to see the paradigm shift beginning to happen.

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Mental Processing is Continuous, Not Like a Computer

Posted by on July 25th, 2005 | No Comments

The following research, New Cornell study suggests that mental processing is continuous, not like a computer appeared recently in a number of major publications.

Through computerized testing, the researchers essentially confirmed AND disputed work theorized by computer scientist, Marvin Minsky, in his book, The Society of Mind. Minsky theorized that the brain processes information through a variety of separate, distinct agents that work together in various capacities. Thus, according to Minsky, information processing is somewhat linear as in our working computers. The researchers seem to confirm the linear biological processing (input) of information, yet claim their findings demonstrate that the “neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties – like a biological organism,” when processing (outputting) information.

There are many similarities between Minsky and Cornell’s group, however, they seem different possibly only by semantics. Once again, the mind seems to have a difficult time describing its own activities.

June 27, 2005

New Cornell study suggests that mental processing is continuous, not like a computer

By Susan S. Lang ITHACA, N.Y. – The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study. Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.

Kevin Stearns/University Photography Cornell psycholinguist Michael Spivey asks Florencia Reali to listen for a word and then click on its picture. By studying the curvature of the trajectory of the mouse, he can analyze language comprehension processes. Copyright © Cornell University

In a new study published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 27-July 1), Michael Spivey, a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell, tracked the mouse movements of undergraduate students while working at a computer. The findings provide compelling evidence that language comprehension is a continuous process.

“For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols – like a digital computer,” said Spivey. “More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties – like a biological organism.”

In his study, 42 students listened to instructions to click on pictures of different objects on a computer screen. When the students heard a word, such as “candle,” and were presented with two pictures whose names did not sound alike, such as a candle and a jacket, the trajectories of their mouse movements were quite straight and directly to the candle. But when the students heard “candle” and were presented with two pictures with similar sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken.

“When there was ambiguity, the participants briefly didn’t know which picture was correct and so for several dozen milliseconds, they were in multiple states at once. They didn’t move all the way to one picture and then correct their movement if they realized they were wrong, but instead they traveled through an intermediate gray area,” explained Spivey. “The degree of curvature of the trajectory shows how much the other object is competing for their interpretation; the curve shows continuous competition. They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete; it’s a dynamical system.”

The computer metaphor describes cognition as being in a particular discrete state, for example, “on or off” or in values of either zero or one, and in a static state until moving on. If there was ambiguity, the model assumed that the mind jumps the gun to one state or the other, and if it realizes it is wrong, it then makes a correction.

“In thinking of cognition as working as a biological organism does, on the other hand, you do not have to be in one state or another like a computer, but can have values in between – you can be partially in one state and another, and then eventually gravitate to a unique interpretation, as in finally recognizing a spoken word,” Spivey said.

Whereas the older models of language processing theorized that neural systems process words in a series of discrete stages, the alternative model suggests that sensory input is processed continuously so that even partial linguistic input can start “the dynamic competition between simultaneously active representations.”

Spivey’s co-authors are Marc Grosjean of the University of Dortmund, Germany, and Günther

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Multitasking vs Task Switching Research

Posted by on July 21st, 2005 | 1 Comment

I recently debated multitasking to task switching. Multitasking denotes attention to a variety of extraneous and internal stimuli. All research that I can find concludes that the human mind performs much less efficiently under multitasking environments–this includes the following article from Johns Hopkins University and published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Task switching denotes shifting full attention from one activity to the next. It seems to parallel our current understanding of brain function in a high stimuli environment.

Multitasking: You can’t pay full attention to both sights and sounds Lab findings suggest reason cell phones and driving don’t mix The reason talking on a cell phone makes drivers less safe may be that the brain can’t simultaneously give full attention to both the visual task of driving and the auditory task of listening, a study by a Johns Hopkins University psychologist suggests. The study, published in a recent issue of “The Journal of Neuroscience,” reinforces earlier behavioral research on the danger of mixing mobile phones and motoring.

“Our research helps explain why talking on a cell phone can impair driving performance, even when the driver is using a hands-free device,” said Steven Yantis, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the university’s Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

“The reason?” he said. “Directing attention to listening effectively ‘turns down the volume’ on input to the visual parts of the brain. The evidence we have right now strongly suggests that attention is strictly limited – a zero-sum game. When attention is deployed to one modality – say, in this case, talking on a cell phone – it necessarily extracts a cost on another modality – in this case, the visual task of driving.”

Yantis’s chief collaborator on this research project was Sarah Shomstein, who was a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins. Shomstein is now a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Though the results of Yantis’ research can be applied to the real world problem of drivers and their cell phones, that was not directly what the professor and his team studied. Instead, healthy young adults ages 19 to 35 were brought into a neuroimaging lab and asked to view a computer display while listening to voices over headphones. They watched a rapidly changing display of multiple letters and digits, while listening to three voices speaking letters and digits at the same time. The purpose was to simulate the cluttered visual and auditory input people deal with every day.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Yantis and his team recorded brain activity during each of these tasks. They found that when the subjects directed their attention to visual tasks, the auditory parts of their brain recorded decreased activity, and vice versa.

Yantis’ team also examined the parts of the brain that control shifts of attention. They discovered that when a person was instructed to move his attention from vision to hearing, for instance, the brain’s parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex produced a burst of activity that the researchers interpreted as a signal to initiate the shift of attention. This surprised them, because it has previously been thought that those parts of the brain were involved only in visual functions.

“Ultimately, we want to understand the connection between voluntary acts of the will (for instance, a choice to shift attention from vision to hearing), changes in brain activity (reflecting both the initiation of cognitive control and the effects of that control), and resultant changes in the performance of a task, such as driving,” Yantis said. “By advancing our understanding of the connection between mind, brain and behavior, this research may help in the design of complex devices – such as airliner cockpits – and may help in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders such as ADHD or schizophrenia.”

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Too much TV Lowers Tests Scores

Posted by on July 18th, 2005 | No Comments

This story is from HealthCentral.com. It is important to realize these data are from three recent studies all indicating the same thing: too much TV results in poorer educational performance.

Kids Who Watch Too Much TV Have Lower Test Scores

Reading, math scores and college education suffer, studies find.

By Steven Reinberg HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, July 4 (HealthDay News) – The effect of television on children has been debated ever since the first sets were turned on.

Now three new studies find that too much tube time can lower test scores, retard learning and even predict college performance.

The reports appear in the July issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

In the first report, researchers studied the effect that having a TV in a child’s bedroom can have on third graders. “We looked at the household media environment in relation to academic achievement on mathematics, reading and language arts tests,” said study author Dina L.G. Borzekowski, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Borzekowski and her colleague, Dr. Thomas Robinson of Stanford University, collected data on 386 third graders and their parents about how much TV the children watched, the number of TV sets, computers and video game consoles in the household and where they were. They also collected data on how much time the children spent using the different media, as well as the time spent doing homework and reading.

The researchers found that the media in the household, where it is and how it is used can have a profound effect on learning. “We found that the household media environment has a very close association with performance on the different test scores,” Borzekowski said.

“A child who has a TV in his or her bedroom is likely to have a score that is eight points lower on a mathematics test compared to a child who doesn’t have a TV in the bedroom,” she noted. These children also scored lower on the reading and language arts tests.

However, children who have access to a home computer are likely to have higher scores on each of the tests compared with children who don’t have access to a home computer, Borzekowski noted.

The reasons why TV has this negative effect are not clear, Borzekowski said. “When there’s TV in the bedroom, parents are less likely to have control over the content and the amount watched,” Borzekowski said. “They are also unable to know how early or how late the set is on. This seems to be associated with kids’ performance on academic tests.”

Borzekowski believes that content and the time the TV is on may be the primary reasons for its negative effect. “If the TV is in the family room, then parents can see the content of what children are watching,” she said. “Parents can choose to sit alongside and watch, or turn the set off. A simple and straightforward, positive parenting strategy is to keep the TV out of the child’s bedroom, or remove it if it’s already there.”

In the second report, Dr. Robert J. Hancox from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and colleagues found, regardless of your intelligence or social background, if you watch a lot of TV during childhood, you are a lot less likely to have a college degree by your mid-20s.

In their study, the researchers followed 1,037 people born in 1972 and 1973. Every two years, between the ages of 5 and 15, they were asked how much television they watched. The researchers found that those who watched the most television during these years had earned fewer degrees by the time they were 26.

“We found that the more television the child had watched, the more likely they were to leave school without any qualifications,” Hancox said in a prepared statement. “Those who watched little television had the best chance of going on to university and earning a degree.”

Hancox’s team found that watching TV at an early age had the most effect on graduating from college. “An interesting finding was that although teenage viewing was strongly linked to leaving school without any qualifications, it was earlier childhood viewing that had the greatest impact on getting a degree,” he said. “This suggests that excessive television in younger children has a long-lasting adverse effect on educational performance.”

In the third paper, Frederick J. Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis from the University of Washington report that, for very young children, watching TV can result in lower test scores in mathematics, reading recognition and reading comprehension.

“We looked at how much television children watched before age 3 and then at ages 3 to 5,” Zimmerman said. “We found that for children who watched a small amount of TV in the earlier years, there was considerable beneficial effect compared to children who watched a lot of TV.”

For children aged 3 to 5, the effect was not as clear, Zimmerman said. “There were some beneficial effects of watching TV on reading, but no beneficial effects for math or vocabulary,” he noted. “The worst pattern was to watch more than three hours of TV before age 3. Those kids had a significant disadvantage compared to the other kids.”

Parents should follow the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation, which is no TV for children under 2, Zimmerman said. “Personally, I feel the cutoff should be children under 3, because there is just not any good content for children under 3.”

One expert believes that TV can have both positive and negative effects, but it all depends on what children are watching.

“Content matters,” said Deborah L. Linebarger, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored an accompanying editorial. “Educational content has been found to be related to performance on school readiness tests, higher grades when they are teenagers, whereas, non-educational content tends to be associated with lower academic performance.”

Another expert agrees. “TV watching takes up space that could be used by more useful things,” said Dr. Christopher P. Lucas, a clinical coordinator at the Early Childhood Evaluation and Treatment Program at the New York University Child Study Center. “TV is not necessarily toxic, but is something that has to be done in moderation; something that balances the other needs of the child for healthy development.”

Lucas puts the responsibility for how much TV kids watch and what they watch squarely on parents. “The amount of TV watching certainly has a link with the reduced amount of time reading or doing homework,” he said. “The key is the amount of control parents have in limiting the amount of access. Get the TV out of the bedroom; be aware of what is being watched; limit the amount of TV watching.”

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He Is Still a Typical Teenager

Posted by on July 10th, 2005 | Comments off

The following story is from the Scotsman.com. Pay particular attention to the section where ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and dyspraxia are described; they are notably different than our perceptions in the States.

The Lost Boy Who Found Happiness

MAIRIONA MCINALLY-KIER

LAST week it was my son’s 13th birthday. We’d barely finished breakfast but he was already on the back lawn, punting a new football back and forth while keeping up a lively running commentary on his imaginary match. And at the weekend, he will host his football party at the local five-a-side club.

No different from any other 13-year-old boy, you might think. Except that all this would have been unthinkable six years ago. Ball skills of any kind were beyond him, he was having problems completing or even starting tasks at school and had great difficulty relating to his peer group.

As a result, his self-esteem was in his boots, he felt himself to be friendless and he was miserable much of the time.

We knew our child was bright: his vocabulary and general knowledge were impressive, his reading age was way above his actual age, and his ability to memorise poetry, song lyrics and times tables was staggering. He was articulate and unfailingly polite. Yet, night after night, he tearfully struggled through his homework, knowing what he wanted to write but unable to commit it to paper. It was as though there was a disconnection between his brain and his hand.

His teacher said that she’d never seen a child like him. She only just managed not to call him lazy but he was so slow at everything, from changing for PE to starting any task in his illegible, awkward scrawl. The learning support teacher was called in and noted that he was unusually disorganised, hesitant in many of his actions and had problems with sequencing. However, as he was clearly not dyslexic, she couldn’t help any further.

By this stage our child was chewing the cuffs of his blazer, shredding his skin with his nails and banging his head with his fist or against walls “to make it work properly”. Our happy-go-lucky toddler had turned into a child who was shunned by others, left out of games because he was clumsy, over-loud and couldn’t be relied upon to catch or stop a ball. Fortunately, the new school year brought with it a new teacher whose first degree was in psychology (and who is now an educational psychologist). Within days she called us and asked us to get him tested, and by the end of that term we were told that our child was dyspraxic with a notable visual-motor dysfunction and accompanying ADHD, an assessment later agreed by the NHS.

Often found to co-exist with dyslexia, ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) or Asperger’s syndrome, dyspraxia is thought to affect about ten per cent of the population to some degree, with boys being four times as likely as girls to suffer from it.

According to the Dyspraxia Foundation, it is “an impairment or immaturity of the organisation of movement. This affects the way in which the brain processes information, resulting in messages not being properly or fully transmitted. Associated with this there may be problems of language, perception and thought”.

As far as we know, children and adults with the condition are wired up slightly differently to what we consider as the norm. Why this should be is still subject to research but it is likely that there are multiple causes. For some, metabolism and diet are implicated, particularly the manner in which essential fatty acids are broken down. It is thought that some children simply do not get enough of the right kind of movement practice while they are babies. Others believe that some children retain primitive reflexes and fail to develop postural reflexes.

Getting a diagnosis is a struggle. As parents, we expect teachers to recognise the condition, but many are not trained to do so. Even if children are referred by their schools, there are simply not enough paediatric occupational therapists and educational psychologists to go round. Assessment waiting lists are long. We know that we are very fortunate to have been able to fund private therapy to help our child. Without it, I doubt he would be the happy 13-year-old he is today.

In the years since that initial diagnosis, we’ve relocated to Glasgow, where our child now attends a private school that recognises his specific learning difficulties but does not diminish its performance expectations. Instead, it accommodates interventions to help him. He uses a writing slope, sits near the front of the class and uses a computer to complete assignments. He used a scribe for several of his S1 exams, an experiment deemed so successful that he’ll use one for most exams in future.

He still has his difficult days but, as he put it at breakfast on his birthday: “That’ll be my hormones!”

In other words, he has what is recognised as a specific learning difficulty, but he is still a typical teenager.

Mairiona McInally-Kier is a volunteer co-ordinator with the Dyspraxia Association in Scotland. For more information, visit www.dyspraxiafoundation.org.uk

This article:

http://www.scotsman.com/?id=817462005

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John Ratey: “Train Your Brain”

Posted by on June 20th, 2005 | Comments off

From A User’s Guide to the Brain by Dr. John J. Ratey, M.D.

…the brain is subject to the same kinds of influences and dysfunctions as other organs. Like a set of muscles, it responds to use and disuse by either growing and remaining vital or decaying, and thus, for the first time, we are learning to see mental weaknesses as physical systems in need of training and practice. The brain is a dynamic, highly sensitive yet robust system that may adapt, for better or worse, to almost any element of its environment. If we are going to set about training our brains to succeed in the world, we certainly need to learn about the various factors that can influence brain functions.

…Neural Darwinism is the theory that explains why the brain needs to be plastic, that is, able to change as our environment and experiences change. That is why we can learn in the first place, and unlearn too, and why people with brain injuries can recover lost functions. The concept also underlies two of the mantras of this book. “Neurons that fire together wire together” means that the more we repeat the same actions and thoughts–from practicing a tennis serve to memorizing multiplication tables–the more we encourage the formation of certain connections and the more fixed the neural circuits in the brain for that activity become.

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Children and Cognitive Overload

Posted by on April 14th, 2005 | Comments off

As Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death, we are in an age where we are inundated with information. Postman states that the average Sunday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a person in the 1700s got in a lifetime.

Now, The Seattle times reports We’re shooting through technological rapids that have opened doors and changed the dynamic of work, how we communicate and live, and sometimes even think. All these tools have made our lives easier in many ways. But they’re also stirring deep unease. Some are concerned that the need for speed is shrinking our attention spans, prompting our search for answers to take the mile-wide-but-inch-deep route and settling us into a rhythm of constant interruption in which deadlines are relentless and tasks are never quite finished.

Scientists call this phenomenon “cognitive overload,” and say it encompasses the modern-day angst of stress, multitasking, distraction and data flurries.

In fact, multitasking — a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once — has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential. This is such a topic of study that it has sprouted a number of terms, from “online compulsive disorder” to “data smog.” Two Harvard professors see evidence of what they call “pseudo-attention deficit disorder” — shorter attention spans influenced by technology and the constant waves of information washing over us. When the brain gets excited over some rapid data and is stimulated, it releases a “dopamine squirt,” they say.

WE ARE WHAT WE THINK “We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before,” says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder. “I think that’s why we’re seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death.”

This is of particular interest when it comes to children who have grown up in the fast lane where Web pages that take more than five seconds to load are considered lame. Is the speed and ease compromising their attention spans? Their perspective? Their humanity? Even their work ethic? Or are we just threatened that they will lap us old fogies?

Little is understood about the Information Age’s effect on this generation, but it is a burgeoning area of research. Ratey wonders if kids would read “The Red Badge of Courage” to complete their homework or simply comb the Internet for essays explaining it all for them.

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ADHD: Retrain the Brain

Posted by on April 14th, 2005 | Comments off

Scientific American, Ocotober 2004 reports that learning retunes the brain, so that more cells respond best to behaviorally important sounds. The researchers also maintain that training responses also depend on the experiences and training of the listener. Even a little training can quickly alter the brain’s reactions. This contradicts previous brain theory that held until about 10 years ago that tuning was “fixed” for each cell in the auditory cortex. The scientists’ studies on contour, however, made them suspect that cell tuning might be altered during learning so that certain cells become extra sensitive to sounds that attract attention and are stored in memory. The retuning was remarkably durable: it became stronger over time without additional training and lasted for months. These findings initiated a growing body of research indicating that one way the brain stores the learned importance of a stimulus is by devoting more brain cells to the processing of that stimulus.

While this research confirms current knowledge about brain reorganization (neuroplasticity) during learning, their research also found that “the pattern of a melody matters: processing in the auditory system is not like the simple relaying of sound in a telephone or stereo system.” For many years scientists have held that certain sites are responsible for reading, listening, etc. But researchers have found that listening, especially to music, “But in recent years we have begun to gain a firmer understanding of where and how music is processed in the brain, which should lay a foundation for answering evolutionary questions. Collectively, studies of patients with brain injuries and imaging of healthy individuals have unexpectedly uncovered no specialized brain “center” for music. Rather music engages many areas distributed throughout the brain, including those that are normally involved in other kinds of cognition. The active areas vary with the person’s individual experiences and musical training. The ear has the fewest sensory cells of any sensory organ–3,500 inner hair cells occupy the ear versus 100 million photoreceptors in the eye. Yet our mental response to music is remarkably adaptable; even a little study can “retune” the way the brain handles musical inputs.”

Localization is the foundation for fMRI and other imaging techniques in that many fMri proponents claim to be able to locate 6 – 8 different types of ADHD via analysis of these scans. If non-localization is true, i.e., the brain processes using a variety of modalities, subcortical as well as cortical tissue, then the superficial images exposed via fMRI may be a dead end as they can only reveal tiny pieces of a very large puzzle.

The bottom line is: The brain can be retrained to overcome learning disabilities, cognitive impairments, ADHD, etc. What we now know is that this is done over a vast network in the brain that encompasses many other minor and major networks. You could think of retraining as the confluence of several telephone companies coming together to in order to overcome a limitation. Each has its own network and substructure but can become bigger and stronger (overcoming their respective limitations) by merging with the other network (think AT&T and Cingular). In the brain, this is done over a wide area of networks – not locally in distinct surface areas as superficial brain imaging might indicate.

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