Over the past three years, we have conducted several research projects at Rossmoor, a retirement community with about 9,000 residents about 20 miles east of San Francisco. Rossmoor is in a beautiful rural setting in a narrow valley surrounded by oak-cloaked hills. I have given a number of lectures there, and am always struck by the great sense of peace and community expressed by its residents. Two Rossmoor citizens stand out for me, and I would like to award them the second “Merzie Prize” for 2007-8, this time in my Do-Gooder Private Citizen category. Leonard Krauss is the President of the Rossmoor computer club, and he’s generously help dozens of his friends and neighbors get onto computer-based training for the sake of their brain health. Len is a beautiful example of a straight-shooting, bonafide nice guy who makes very good use of his rich technical background almost every day to help people. He appears (of course) to enjoy every minute of it.

His friend and collaborator Stan Karansky is a retired medical doctor in his 90’s. If you were to meet and talk with Stan, you would instinctively peg him as a far younger man, because Stan has been a devotee of brain fitness training, and is just full of life — a walking advertisement for the benefits of keeping your brain in good shape! Given his scientific and medical background, Stan is informed about the principles of brain plasticity, and is doing his damnedest to explain to his fellow citizens that this kind of exercise is “what the doctor ordered”. He’s talked a lot of ‘em into it, and they’re the better for it! Way to go, Stan!

I tip my hat — and hereby award a 2008 Merzie Prize — to these two very fine men, of EXTRAORDINARY intelligence and good will!

I just read a report from the Everett, Massachusetts school district that illustrates what CAN be achieved in helping children catch up, in a very short time. Everett is a north-Boston suburb that was once rated as a top Massachusetts district, but a change in its demographics over the past 40 years has greatly increased the challenges that it faces. 55 languages are now represented in its approximately 6,000 students; 44% of its children are ELLs. A large proportion of its students are from low SES households.

In the 2006-2007 school year, 1290 of the District’s children were enrolled in the intensive brain-plasticity-based Fast ForWord language and reading training programs, in 6 Everett schools. As a result:

1) The percentage of the enrolled students who scored as proficient in reading in these schools jumped from 16 to 38%.

About 30% of American school-age children are proficient readers. Think of what it means, kid by kid, to convert so many children to this higher status with only one year of special effort. Think what it means for each of these schools, to shoot up from a below-average academic training environment to a significantly-above-average environment in a single year. It shall be exciting to see how many MORE children cross this threshold in 2007-2008! It shall be fun to see how far these schools can progress in achievement, across the landscape of Massachusetts public schools!

2) Unprecented gains in State of Massachusetts test scores were recorded for both reading and math in these 6 schools. One school site (Parlin) at which FFW was employed applied was especially impressively transformed, in one year, from having the lowest state test achievement scores in both reading and math in the District, to having the highest.

3) Overall reading comprehension scores over this one year advanced for the average kid by about 2 years. It continues to be fascinating to me that most educational authorities still do not recognize this intensive brain science-based language training (FFW) as a “reading” program. ENABLING successful reading by ‘fixing’ a neurological resource that crucially supports it is just not good enough, for the keepers of the “science of education” or “reading science” flame!

This is a fairly typical story for a school district in which this brain science-based training program has been well-administered. Children do not have to be “left behind”. Kids can catch up. You can see many equally compelling examples of this at

A large, controlled study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education has just shown that a widely mandated program (Reading First) delivered to promulgate ‘best practices’ for reading education out to American schools in need of help as a >$1 billion part of the “No Child Left Behind” program leaves children behind. The Reading First program was established by “No Child Left Behind legislation in 2002, with three main goals. The first was to assure that schools used scientifically accepted “best practices” (training strategies; materials) in reading instruction. The second goal was to train educators and adminstrators in ways that could assure that these best instructional practies were appropriately and effectively delivered. A third goal was to assess the effectiveness of this new approach for achieving reading-education improvement.

You’d think that Goal 3 would be on the Year 1 agenda. Not so. Six years (with billions spent on reading instruction) later, we learn that schools that followed these promulgated best practices are indistinguishable from those who did not.

How CAN it be that our government authorities broadly mandate a program that doesn’t work? Why HAS educational science related to reading achievement done such a poor job of delivering out strategies that substantially and unequivocally move the reading proficiency meter in American schools? Why IS there almost no change in the percentage of proficient readers (a pathetic 30% or so of readers in American public schools) achieved, despite our great and sincere and costly efforts over the past several decades (much less over the past 6 years of NCLB) — even while more and more REALLY failing students aren’t being counted in these statistics because millions of failing young people prematurely leave middle and high schools?

We citizens are entitled to answers to these questions.

When Reid Lyon, a distinguished Department of Education leader who helped draft Reading First programs into legislation has talked about its values, he has repeatedly argued that it had led to key changes in American schools. He’s noted that because of its extensive educator-training initiatives, reading educators all across the country are now well informed about the science of reading. Because of Reading First, they now understand, can recite and apply those “scientific best practices”.

Which leads me to a final comment, and a question:

My comment: Maybe there is something lacking in those “scientific best practices”.

My question: How long will it be before the Department of Education (or the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development) comes to realize that the scientific best practices promulgated by programs like Reading First — aren’t (i.e., either particularly scientific, or best practices)?

In two earlier blogs (last August 3rd, 5th), I briefly discussed some aspects of the neuroscience of “reactive attachment disorders” (RADs). That evoked an informative series of comments from individuals whose families or friends had struggled with this problem. One comment, by “Teletype”, indicated that I did not have an accurate view of the Self. “You don’t provide an explanation of what could account for people’s differences — differences in responses, opinions, emotions, likes/dislikes, behavior, things said and not said, extent of non-verbal communication and quality of it, etc. THIS is the self, not the other things.”

To which I respond, “Balderdash!”

But before explaining why, let me re-state how I described the development of a baby “Self” that is attached to a parent — or vice versa — from the earlier blog:

Within the womb, especially in the third trimester when the fetus makes us very aware of its presence, it literally becomes a part of the Self that is its mother. Through millions of neurologically constructed (wired!) associations, the baby and mother are, in mom’s brain, an integrated entity. Is it hardly surprising, then, that in the natural course of things most mothers are almost super-naturally attached to their new-born infants. This attachment is further nurtured and elaborated through the mother’s close physical and emotional attachment ot the infant post-natally. That infant is a regular, constant, emotionally important part of the mother’s (father’s, grandparent’s, sibling’s) life on a level at which it is literally encorporated into THEIR Selves. A mother or close and constant caregiver is LITERALLY bonded — attached — to the Person who loves them, in neurological as well as emotional terms.

In the normal case, the same kind of attachment is also growing in the backward direction, from the mother to the infant. In this case, attachment is less cerebral. The infant receives warmth, nourishment, and many other rewards from his or her mother. The mother is a source of food, safety, comfort, and countless little pleasures. The baby quickly understands that their mother (or other continous care-giver) provides a safe base of operations for exploration and adventure. One of the most non-intuitive discoveries in the study of infant-child bonding is that the most secure infants have (on the statistical average) the greatest curiosity and the strongest explorative and inventive instincts. It has been argued that this occurs because such a child is operating from the very secure base and reliability for having its primary needs met by its mother.

If emotional responses were merely delivered to us via a handoff from Mother Nature or the Creator of the Universe as Teletype suggests, then why does infant deprivation matter so damn much. Why is the PERSON the young child is, so distorted in their “responses, opinions, emotional responses, likes and dislikes…, things that they say and don’t say?” Or to put it another way, where in heavens do you think our responses, opinions, emotional responses, all of our likes and dislikes beyond the primitive, most aspects of our specific behaviors, and things that we say and don’t say COME from, Teletype?! Out of the thin air?! THEY GROW WITHIN US, THROUGH BRAIN PLASTICITY, Teletype. Collectively, they ARE us.

Our plastic brain creates a model of the external world AND of itSELF from its passage through life — from its experiences — by physically remodeling its detailed connections, i.e., BY BRAIN PLASTICITY.

That is certainly also the case in a child that develops a RAD. Because it’s world is so impoverished and distorted, it has to create a model of both the world and itSelf under very difficult conditions. It is little wonder that it just can’t get it right! From this neuroscience perspective, what IS missing for such a child in the experiences that drive plastic changes and shape the operations of the Self, in the domain of emotional response and control as it relates to human attachment?

Such a child has been impoverished in behaviors that have consequences in their early histories. Almost nothing that almost-continuously-neglected child did in early childhood mattered. Their little brains were starved for those many thousands of moments in normal infants for which their actions lead to an appropriate, timely, caregiver-delivered responses. Needs WEREN’T responded to, WEREN’T met.

Beyond that deprivation, the limited care provided in a socially impoverished environment can be interpreted by the brain as punishing. Infant rashes and dirty diapers and hunger are, from the brain’s perspective, BAD outcomes, ultimately associated with absent and neglectful and resented adult care-givers. In such a scenario, in the child’s brain:

1) the brain machinery that reliably relates the child’s actions to predictable, timely, positive external-agent-delivered consequences is very poorly developed;

2) the processes that normally massively associate positive-attachment-related behaviors that establish the crucial two-way linkage of the child’s and parent’s SELF-creation are grossly stunted.

3) care-giving adults predict bad outcomes.

Consider another example. A child is raised in a family a) in which there is little talking (just as in the orphanage). In that family, b) most verbal interactions between adults and that child are approbations (probably ALSO common in some orphanage environments), and are c) commonly accompanied by physical abuse, and by d) neglect.

This is (alas) an altogether far too common an American scenario. When such a child goes to school, they enter an environment that is full of happy talkers. Not so, with high likelihood, our neglected, language- and socially-impoverished child. They REJECT talking and socializing (school). They can come to resent and rebel against their good-hearted classroom teacher — for the same kinds of reasons that those RAD kids can reject loving care-givers. If they chronically misbehave (have a “behavior disorder) and fail in school from the outset, their prospects for later imprisonment are far higher than their prospects for later emotional and financial and social prosperity.

Our challenge is to help all these children in need build the fundamental neurological foundations that associate their actions with positive consequences expressed by the actions of the adults that “rule” their lives — caregivers, teachers, grandparents, therapists, etc. — and by their peers. I have been thinking a lot about how to use a technological approach to assist a responsible care-giver or teacher or therapist in providing a intensive brain-training boost to help build and sustaining these fundamental skills in these entirely innocent young children. More about that subject, in a later blog.

If you haven’t done your homework (haven’t read “misconceptions 1-4″), go do it, then read this one. You’ll find those entries on November 7th, December 5th, April 29th, and May 1st. Which lead us to:

Misconception 5. Our functional abilities at any stage of life are a handoff from Mother Nature or the Creator of the Universe.

One of the most common notions about your cognitive losses as you grow older is that they simply express the work of that Mother, Nature. You’re young, you’re old. You’re clumsy, you’re agile. You have a large repertoire of funny stories, you can’t tell a good joke to save your soul. You’re good at math, you’re bad at math. You have a memory like a tack, you can’t remember how to get the bathroom. It’s just your lot, in life — your God-given (inherited) endowment — to be old, clumsy, humorless, bad at math, and desperately looking for the bathroom. After all, YOU, the person that you are, are just a hand-off from the Creator of the Universe (or from Mother Nature).

It’s not true. YOU are a marvelous creation that arose in your brain, shaped in a million ways by all of the things that YOU did in life. Your abilities, your special skills, all of your knowledge, all of the people and specific things that really matter to you, all of those crystallized beliefs and principles that guide and structure your life — ALL OF IT — emerged, through brain plasticity, within your skull, within your lifetime.

YOU are your OWN creation.

YOU are in CHARGE of yourSELF, and of keeping it (your brain) in good shape!

Maintaining the healthy PERSON (brain) is an important goal for any sensible individual, at every age in life. You can always be better, stronger, more capable, more accomplished, still growing in understanding — because your brain is PLASTIC. Because all ability has been/is conferred via its plasticity, and at any age, improvement in brain function can be achieved, and
YOU CAN BE BETTER.

So the next time you hear yourself saying “I’m just old. My old brain is just wearing out. There is really nothing I can do about it….” just slap yourself.

Stop making excuses and take responsibility for the thoughtless way you’ve been taking care of yourSELF, and get thee to the brain fitness center!

Many of you may have seen this program. At last count, it has been shown several thousand times. Almost every PBS station has repeatedly aired it. Moreover, like a bad penny, it’ll show up again, in the next pledge-break period! All of this attention stems from its success.

PBS viewers have made this one of the most successful (perhaps in the end, THE single most effective) fund-raising programs in history. My colleagues and I at Posit are very proud of that fact, for three reasons.

First, it means that many hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals have been educated about brain plasticity, as a resource that they can employ to improve their brain health and mental vitality.

Second, it means that tens of thousands of individuals in need of help have received it, via our donation of these many thousands of copies of the Brain Fitness Program to PBS.

Third, Public Broadcasting is an important informational and educational resource for every American citizen, and we are VERY happy to contribute so materially to its continuing good health.

Because of its success, PBS is providing support for the production of a second “Brain Fitness Program”……… coming into your home from a PBS station near you, not too far into the future!

An important recent study reported by scientists from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell and Rutgers universities (Gaab N, Gabrieli JD, Deutsch GK, Tallal P, Temple E, Restor Neurol Neurosci 25:295-310, 2007) has documented the emergence of more normal brain response patterns resulting from intensive brain plasticity-based training, in children with impairments in language and reading abilities. Significant improvements in language and reading (see Temple et al., PNAS 100:2860-5, 2003) in these special children resulted from their completion of Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWord-Language exercise suite (see www.scientificlearning.com). A large body of earlier studies had already shown that such improvements are at least substantially attributable to training-driven gains in the accuracy and the speed of processing of sound stimuli (improved “temporal processing”).

That conclusion was further supported by these current studies. They showed that a specific region in the lateral frontal cortex was strongly activated in a temporally-demanding sound reception task, in every one of 20 ‘control’ children (Girl and Boy Scouts earning a merit badge who had normal language and reading abilities). By contrast, this frontal cortex zone was not significantly activated in any of the 20 reading-and-language impaired kids performing the same temporally-demanding task. That’s 20 for 20 vs 0 for 20! It certainly would not be difficult to determine which kids were performing better, in the language arts, in the schoolhouse!

After Fast ForWord training, most of these struggling children a) substantially overcame their impairments in language and reading, and b) now had more normal responses evoked while performing these challenging sound reception tasks, in this key frontal cortex region.

Guess whose grades now improved in school!

Before I talk about this misconception, if you’re new to this argument I ask you to go back and start at the beginning by reviewing misconceptions 1-3. They are described in posts made on October 7th, December 5th, and April 29th. After you read them, you’re ready for #4!

Misconception 4: Cognitive fitness is all about memory. if you could just fix your memory, you’d be an older-age paragon!

There is a very strong focus in aging research on understanding the origins of — and on that basis, potentially positively manipulating — a failing memory. About half of the talks at the NIA-sponsored summit focused on our understanding of memory loss, and its potential neurological rehabilitation (largely through a drug-discovery research path).

Imagine that I COULD completely restore your youthful memory with the snap of my fingers. Now imagine that your brain can no longer control when you pee or poop, that you are in danger of falling over every time you try to stand up, can’t get up from the floor if you happen to tumble down onto it, are dizzy every time you get up out of bed, can no longer competently drive your car, no longer see anything funny about life or anyone else’s attempt at humor, can no longer taste or enjoy your food, wish people would just leave you alone, struggle to tie your shoes, can’t stay awake through even a half-hour television show, can no longer understand your grand-daughter when she talks fast like she always does, just plain hurt for much of every day — or suffer from any one of a thousand OTHER brain-based vicissitudes of life. Memory is a VERY good thing to have as a neurological asset. If it is in good shape, lots of other aspects of behavioral performance and control are supported. A good working memory and delayed recall abilities manifest at least adequately retained perceptual abilities. It is crucial for continuing personal growth. At the same time, a good memory CAN (not infrequently, DOES) reside in a totally miserable brain and body.

Even having a GREAT memory cannot assure your independence. A chap named Stephen Peek had read and eidetically (”photographically”) remembered the chapter, page, verse and sentences from about a thousand books. Later memorialized in the movie “Rain Man,” his legendary memory did not translate into great personal achievement! Memory is a great asset only to the extent that it confers understanding, and can be translated into useful thought and action.

A well-designed brain fitness program must consider issues of fitness and health that apply to the WHOLE brain and the WHOLE body. That is exactly what we have been trying to develop in our research, and exactly what we are trying to deliver via the complicated suites of training programs that have been (and are being) created by our Posit Science research and development team.

On Monday, I spent several hours at a Los Angeles meeting interviewing Jeff Hawkins in front of an audience of about several hundred business people. I would not ordinarily agree to take on this kind of duty, but I admire Jeff, regard him as a friend — and he asked me to do it.

One of Jeff’s main claim to fame is the invention of the hand-held computer. As a young engineer, he led a team that created one of the first “tablet computers” (with touch screens that you could write on in cursive script), and came to understand that the greatest practical use for such a computer would result from loading this capability onto a hand-held device. With the development of more-reliable handwriting recognition software assisted by teaching its users how to write less confusably (“Graffitti”, which Hawkins invented), and with the development of software that allowed you to exchange important data files with your desktop computer (“HotSync”, ditto), his “Palm Pilot” and its successor (the “Treo) were great commercial successes on the path to our PDA-rich modern lives.

Throughout this journey, Jeff Hawkins was very aware that his own brain had pattern recognition capabilities that were impossible to match with his computer software. This led him to pursue models of the real human brain, as a strategy for creating a new generation of pattern recognizers that could have the pattern recognizing power of REAL brains. To recruit the best kind of help to achieve that goal, he created the non-profit Redwood Neurosciences Institute, where he began to develop his own special theoretical perspective guiding him to the creation of a new generation of real-brain-like computers. The overall perspective that evolved from this research is documented in an important book written with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence (Time Books:New York). It’s highly recommended reading, for anyone interested in how their brain actually operates. While the Hawkins-Blakeslee treatment is heavy on theory and light on the elucidation of specific, underlying brain mechanisms and processes, a great mass of behavioral and neurological evidence supports the main premises and conclusions of the Hawkins view, to whit:

1) The brain records all information in the context in which occurs, in serial time.
2) That empowers it to grow the ability, through brain plasticity, to make ongoing serial predictions (“What goes with what?” “What comes next?”).
3) Through these brain plasticity-based serial memory/predictive processes, the machinery of your brain creates an increasingly powerful and reliable and complete model of your external and internal world, constructed from massively recorded-and-stored serial memories.
4) The recording of hundreds of millions of serial events provides the neurological bases of your incredibly powerful “pattern recognition” capability.
5) This powerful capacity for pattern recognition (reconstruction of an orderly world that the brain now knows about, and now understands) results in

a. reliable information FLOW guiding our ongoing interpretation of “What’s happening.” Ongoing prediction is the “engine” that drives your stream of consciousness (mental — and physical — ‘actions’) in controlled (useful, meaningful) directions.

b. a syntax (associative memory-based predictions of next-expected and later-expected events) that contributes greatly to representational completion and reliability

c. our capacity for “invention”, which stems from innumerable predictions, near and remote, arising from many sources and from many directions, which we can peruse and recover from our incredibly elaborate stores of complex-serially-recorded information.

I know that this superficial explanation may a little bit difficult for many of you blogsters to follow. It would help to read the Hawkins-Blakeslee book, which is not difficult to follow. ‘Tis highly recommended reading.

Would computers that operate more like human brains be useful for us? You bet! At the same time, don’t worry about being replaced by one just yet, as Numenta (Jeff Hawkins’ small brain-like-computer startup company that is building this new class of machine) is still operating with early-stage models. Moreover, YOU have been very connected to YOUR world for 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or more years, now. You’ve probably recorded BILLIONS of serial memories/associations. YOUR predicting/pattern recognizing machine is loaded up to the gills with information that can reliably give you the mostly-right answer, and that empowers your capacity for considerable wisdom and invention from a very neatly constructed model of YOUR external AND internal world. Loading Jeff Hawkins’ Numenta machines with the information provided you about the real outside world by your eyes, ears, nose, balance organ, body, etc., and about your real inside world from your brain operations themselves is no walk in the park!

On the other hand, you can make book that it shall soon be possible to load a Numenta machine with almost anything ever recorded relating to a specific goal or task – then to put that fully-loaded machine onto a creative task. Or as in the old science fiction movies, you’ll be able to ask your Numenta-type computer what IT thinks about ITS model of the world. Before too long, this kind of brain-like machine can potentially be a VERY good source of advice! Moreover, it can gather information (live its life gathering info about what goes with what and what comes next) at very high speed — can have a head size (associative memory capacity) that dwarfs even YOUR processing capabilities – will NEVER get tired or nervous or distracted — and shall NEVER grow old, or (with suitable backup strategies) die.

Which raises the question: “Where is this all headed, Alice?!” Onward, perilously, to a Brave New World in which machines have powers of “understanding” and “invention” that shall almost certainly dwarf our individual capabilities. This represents another of a long series of evolving technologies that are being delivered into our culture with little guidance, and with no real understanding of its down-stream consequences, for modern cultures and societies. Jeff Hawkins is a wonderful, caring, do-gooder human being. He is unleashing a powerful genie from a bottle, I think with his fingers crossed.

Which is all another way of saying that you should prepare yourself for still another ton of bricks landing on your head in the form of a completely new class of computers that cn go to school and learn to be damn smart just like you did, via their own ‘brain plasticity’ mechanisms – as one of the next great ‘gifts’ contributed to humankind via the collaboration of brain science and technology! So “Hang on, Alice! The ride may be a bumpy one, and we may be driving over a cliff…..”

I recently read Elyn Saks personal account of her life with schizophrenia (The Center Cannot Hold, Hyperion:New York) and found it to be enlightening, frequently almost painful to read, and at the same time heartening, and hopeful. Her lucid, blunt descriptions of her illness has further amplified my personal motivation (which was already pretty high!) to work still harder to develop strategies designed to prevent and treat this devastating illness.

To quote a brilliant, illustrative passage, wonderfully summarizing the neuropathology of this disease:

“Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One’s center gives way. The center cannot hold. The “me” becomes a haze…. There is no longer a sturdy vantage point from which to look out, take things in, assess what’s happening… Sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings don’t go together. No organizing principle takes successive moments in time and puts them together in a coherent way from which sense can be made.”

Elyn Saks graphically describes her passage into psychosis, and the complex personal history of psychotherapeutics that followed her tortuous path repetitively into and out of control. She brilliantly describes her thought disorder, in the first person. One aspect of her journey that struck home was her powerful feelings of inadequacy and shame that frequently delayed her seeking treatment or accepting help. Her best times for controlling her illness were those epochs when she lived with or was being treated by individuals that she loved, and that loved her in turn — an intimate group of university friends, a generous young landlord, an effective British psychotherapist, her understanding husband.

If you have a schizophrenic in your life, and/or if you want to read a powerful first-person description of living with this devastating illness, read this book.