There 130 million youth worldwide who are not in school. Of these 130 million youth, 70% are girls. In developing countries, only one out of every four girls attends school.

These little girls will grow up to be women. Many will become child brides; they will become wives and mothers before they are women. This is provided that they survive childbirth, as the leading cause of death for girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide is maternal mortality.

We speak often of a “war on poverty”, but in order to adequately win the war on poverty, we must end the war on women worldwide. Less than 2 cents of every developmental dollar goes to our girls. Nine out of ten youth programs are aimed at our young men.

She’s The First, a nonprofit organization geared towards educating girls, seeks to change this by helping fund education for girls. Their latest fundraiser, the “Voice Your Verse” campaign, was a star-studded event that raised over $10,000 via the marriage of poetry, civic duty, and philanthropy. Amongst the attendees were Azure Antoinette, an acclaimed poet whom Oprah Winfrey happens to think is amazing; Monique Coleman of High School Musical; and Bosilika An, a youth philanthropist and speaker.

Monique Coleman spoke earnestly about the challenges young women face, saying “My experience traveling as UN Youth Champion exposed me to many of the challenges that girls face globally. “She’s the First” is an incredible organization that is addressing one of the most fundamental issues which is education. “Voice Your Verse” was one of those unique and powerful experiences where art and social impact intersected. I loved every minute of it and I will continue to support the organization!”

It’s time to make the investment in our girls- they are worth far more than the 2 cents per dollar they’re receiving. The value of educating our girls will raise the value and economic output of the country as women join the workforce. It will also increase the value of families. Women invest 90% of their income back into the household (the average for men is 30-40%). An extra year of primary school increases girls’ wages by 10% to 20%. An extra year of secondary school continues to increase wages by 15% to 25%.

Let’s do the math.

Visit www.shesthefirst.org to donate or find out how you can help.

Teachers in schools with students living in prolonged poverty often get frustrated. In areas where a majority of students live in poverty, teachers often complain about students’ chronic tardiness, the high rate of absenteeism, lack of motivation to study, low academic achievement, disruptive social and emotional behavior, difficulty paying attention to instructions and remembering what has been taught, as well as students’ inability to process information as quickly as it is being presented.

The loss of confidence that follows can negatively impact motivation, behavior and self-esteem, and harm overall academic performance. Often teachers blame parents or guardians and the home situation for their student’s low academic achievement, poor cognitive development and disruptive social and emotional behavior. They say that parents or guardians do not read to their children, do not encourage their children to read and do not provide enriching mental experiences or teach them proper social and emotional behavior.

But we rarely hear teachers say a contributing factor to poor students’ emotional and social behavior and poor academic performance in school may be related to the brain and the negative effects of brain development of children living in poverty conditions, experiencing chronic stressors. We believe teachers and school administrators should know more about how the brain functions and about student learning. They should be aware of emerging neuroscience-research results reporting a strong relationship between children living in prolonged poverty and the negative effects on their brain development. The brain damage is reported to affect three parts of the brain—the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and amygdala—causing a negative impact on social and emotional behavior, memory, attention, concentration, academic achievement, cognitive development, goal-setting, decision-making and planning.

The damage to a child’s brain cells from prolonged poverty is similar to a child being hit hard in the head with an object. However, children do not have to be stuck with this damage, because of the brain’s neuroplasticity, its ability to change over a lifetime. Various strategies based on research have proven successful and could alter how educators approach their students and their teaching strategies in classrooms of high-poverty schools.

Emerging research suggests that growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids; it might also be bad for their brains. According to a 2008 study appearing in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, the neural systems of poor children actually develop differently from those of middle-class children. There is a physiological, neurological or biological effect on children’s brains starting at an early age, eventually showing up in school and affecting them through adolescence and adulthood.

Infants in Poverty
Recent research contends that weak or anxious attachments formed by infants in poverty become the basis for full-blown insecurity during early childhood, and this shows up in the classroom. Very young children require healthy attachments, learning and exploration for optimal brain development. Unfortunately, in impoverished families, there is higher prevalence of such adverse factors as teen motherhood, depression and inadequate health care—all of which lead to decreased sensitivity toward the infant. As a result, children later face emotional and social instability, as well as poor school behavior and academic performance. Often, if a mother is abusing drugs, under tremendous stress, being physically abused before a child is born can add to the lack of social and emotional support after they are born.

New research suggests that the complex web of social relationships children experience early in life—with family members, peers and adults in their school—exerts a much greater influence on their brains and behavior than researchers had previously assumed. This process starts with students’ core relationships with parents or primary caregivers in their lives, which form personalities that are either secure and attached or insecure and unattached. Securely attached children between birth and 24 months typically behave better in school.

Beginning at birth, the attachment formed between parent and child predicts the quality of future relationships with teachers and peers and plays a leading role in the development of curiosity, arousal, emotional regulation, independence and social competence. The brains of infants are hardwired for only six emotions: joy, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness and fear. To grow up with the tools to be emotionally and socially healthy, children under age 3 need a strong, reliable primary caregiver who provides consistent and unconditional love, guidance, and support; safe, predictable, stable, nurturing, loving environments; 10 to 20 hours each week of harmonious, reciprocal interactions; and enrichment through personalized, increasingly complex activities.

Children raised in poverty are much less likely to have these crucial needs met than are their more affluent peers, and, as a result, are subject to some grave consequences. Deficits in these areas inhibit the production of new brain cells, alter the path of maturation and rework the healthy neural circuitry in children’s brains, thereby undermining emotional and social development and predisposing them to emotional dysfunction.

In many poor households, parental education is substandard, time is short and warm emotions are at a premium—factors that put the attunement process at risk. Caregivers tend to be overworked, overstressed and authoritarian with children, using the same harsh disciplinary strategies used by their own parents. They often lack warmth and sensitivity and fail to form solid, healthy relationships with their children. Parents living in prolonged poverty are also often overwhelmed by diminished self-esteem, depression and a sense of powerlessness and inability to cope—feelings that may get passed along to their children in the form of insufficient nurturing, negativity and a general failure to focus on dependents’ needs. A 2001 study of emotional problems of children of single mothers found that the stress of poverty increases depression rates among mothers, which results in an increased use of physical punishment. Children themselves are also susceptible to depression; research shows that poverty and prolonged stressors are major predictors of teenage depression.

Chronic Stressors and Children’s Brain Development
Some stressors that children living in prolonged poverty experience are having very young, single or low-educational-level parents; poor nutrition; parents or guardians experiencing chronic unemployment; abuse and neglect; substance abuse; dangerous neighborhoods; homelessness and mobility; and exposure to inadequate educational experiences.

Chronic stress is a state of ongoing physiological arousal. This occurs when children have so many stressors, like the ones above, that they remain in a heightened state of arousal and do not feel they have any control over the stressors. Their autonomic nervous system rarely has a chance to activate the relaxation response. Our fight-or-flight response, which was designed to help us fight a few life-threatening situations (acute stress) spaced out over a long period (like being attacked by a bear every so often), can wear down our bodies and cause us to have brain damage or become ill, either physically or emotionally. Chronic stressors can have a negative impact on the parts of our brain responsible for memory, attention, language development, reading, emotions, goal-setting and overall cognitive development—all important for success in school.

Three Parts of Children’s Brains Affected by Chronic Stressors
A cognitive-response study in 2009 noted that chronic stressors have a physiological impact on a child’s prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and amygdala. The prefrontal cortex, located in the very front of the head, behind the forehead, carries out executive functioning—i.e., short-term memory, social and emotional control, problem-solving, decision-making, planning, thinking, goal-setting and the ability to suppress urges which, if not suppressed, could lead to socially-unacceptable outcomes.

The hippocampus is a part of the limbic system, often called the emotional brain. It plays important roles with emotions and in consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, important for memory and learning. A damaged hippocampus in children can negatively impact their memory.

The amygdala is also a part of the limbic system and deals with emotions, helping to process memories and managing response to fear and stress. The amygdala’s job is to determine how to respond to a wow type of event, be it an emergency or something that simply startles a child—any type of event that produces an emotional response.

Stress wreaks havoc on children’s brains. Scientists believe that stress changes the activities of neurotransmitters, chemical messengers in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and amygdala; suppresses the creation of new neurons in the three parts of the brain; causes neurons to undergo remodeling of dendrites—part of the brain’s communication network—for the worse; and shrinks the volume of the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.

If the stressors have not been removed, the adrenal glands secrete a stress hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is intended for use in short-term stressful situations, such as fleeing from a dangerous animal. When a person suffers from chronic stress, including the stress of poverty, the long-term presence of cortisol can damage brain cells. The hippocampus is particularly sensitive to cortisol levels and suffers the most damage.

Nutrition and Children’s Brain Development
Brain research has indicated that the foods children eat or do not eat affect their brain development, functioning and behavior. Chemicals released in response to stress and from foods can prevent higher-order thinking. Chronic stress causes the body to deplete nutrients, inhibits the growth of dendrites and limits interconnections among neurons. The results are no nutrients available for learning; thinking is slowed; learning is depressed. When protein foods, often lacking in diets of poor children, are digested, tyrosine is released into the bloodstream. Tyrosine becomes L-dopa in the brain and is then converted into dopamine. Dopamine produces a feeling of alertness, attentiveness, quick thinking, motivation and mental energy. Fear of failure, isolation and trauma, usually present in poor children, cause dopamine to be converted into norepinephrine. This causes alertness to be converted into aggression and agitation. When nutrition is poor, children have difficulty tolerating frustration and stress, become apathetic, and are non-responsive, inactive and irritable. How can they even attempt to learn?

Carbohydrate foods cause the production of serotonin. Low levels of serotonin are associated with depression and low self-esteem. The body manufactures its own serotonin when an individual experiences positive self-esteem, success in problem-solving and other accomplishments. Teachers should find ways for students to be successful, thereby increasing levels of serotonin. In terms of nutrition, students should have access to breakfast and lunch programs, as well as nutritious snacks.

In the end
Children of poverty do not choose to behave differently in school, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront. Their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions affecting the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and amygdala in ways that undermine good emotional and social behavior and academic performance. We believe that school systems should meet the needs of these students. Happily there are schools such as Timbuktu Academy that are implementing strategies like the Brain Education System to address improvements in attention, memory, readiness for learning, focus, concentration, self-confidence and self-esteem.

Successful Strategies
Living in poverty and experiencing chronic stressors present students with an extraordinary challenge to academic and social success. This reality does not mean that success in school or life is impossible. On the contrary, a better understanding of these challenges points to actions educators and administrators can take to help these students succeed.

Brain-development issues caused by chronic stressors can be reversed through intensive interventions. Some of these interventions can take place at home and within the day-to-day school environment. For example, at Timbuktu Academy, reflection time (meditation) was added every morning for all Junior High and 9th graders. The school also has Family Groups. Each faculty member has about 10 students assigned to them, and they meet with them each day as a family. The teachers personally bond with them. Both of these strategies affect positive neurotransmitters and help the brain get ready for learning. The children are more open to listening and paying attention.

Brain Education Curriculum
At Timbuktu Academy, the Brain Education organization conducted highly experiential professional-development training to introduce the Brain Education curriculum to the staff. The experiential brain-focused curriculum involved brain-related activities to help students to increase attention, memory, focus, concentration and relaxation, and how to reduce unhealthy stress, as well as teaching exercises and movements to improve readiness to learn.

The brain-related activities aimed to increase self-confidence, self-esteem and ways to control social and emotional behavior. Current brain research supports this type of instruction for students struggling in reading, writing and spelling. This training was followed up with Timbuktu Academy faculty training sessions with Dr. Kenneth Wesson, a leader in assisting faculty with understanding children’s brain functioning and learning.

Whole Brain Teaching
Faculty trained in Whole Brain Teaching focused on how the brain learns best—especially for students in high-poverty schools. It is a method that integrates an effective classroom management system with learning approaches that tap the way the brain learns best. It is a multisensory approach to instruction, which helps students learn through more than one of the senses at the same time. Students are taught using all pathways of learning simultaneously, in order to enhance memory and learning.

Whole Brain Teaching classroom environments are encouraging and student-centered. At Timbuktu, we believe that teaching methods must be aligned with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and how learning happens. For example, educators need to make allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything we are learning. In addition, we encourage faculty to use multimodality strategies along with multisensory approaches.

Phonics First
Timbuktu Academy faculty was also trained in Phonics First. It is RLAC’s (Reading and Language Arts Center) accredited methodology to teaching literacy, which our students need. It is prescriptive, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive and flexible. Based on how the brain learns best.

Zoophonics
In addition, faculty was trained in Zoophonics, which is also a multisensory language-arts program based on phonemic awareness and phonics, taught kinesthetically and mnemonically. It is a kinesthetic, multimodal approach to learning all aspects of language arts.

Math Corps
Timbuktu faculty has been trained in Math Corps, a system out of Wayne State University that recognizes how the brain learns best and the cognitive mechanisms for learning mathematics and ways to differentiate mathematics instruction through a multisensory approach.

For these methods to succeed in schools like Timbuktu Academy, teachers must be highly effective, hard-working, committed and able. There must be high expectations for student success, success for themselves, parents and the community. There are no excuses; there is no blame for students’ low achievement. What is needed always is more time on-task, instructional time, extended day, extended school year, Saturdays and summer. Also there must be relentless use of data, ongoing, diagnostic assessment of student progress and multiple opportunities for improvement.

Warrington S. Parker, Jr., PhD, is the president of Magnum Educational Management Company. Brenda A. Parker is the principal of Timbuktu Academy of Science and Technology in Detroit, Michigan. The academy enrolls over 450 students and is considered a high-poverty school.

Swimming is such fun and it is a wonderful way to stay healthy for life! Did you know that babies can develop a passion for swimming? They are born with a love for the water so parents can go together on an exciting adventure as their child learns about water and eventually learns to swim!

Before the age of three or four months, the bathtub is a perfect place for the little one to begin to developing a healthy relationship with this liquid medium. In his early training, the infant will experience a great deal of tactile stimulation from water resistance over his entire body. The water has over 600 times the resistance of air which is great for the muscles and it encourages neurological development too. The more tactile stimulation of the nerves the child experiences, the more that interconnections and neural pathways can develop in the brain cells. This touch and connection with the water between a parent and child can also establish a deeper emotional bond between the parent and child because they’re face to face, skin to skin, touching in the water.

Early introduction to aquatics is best, because a child under age one is less influenced by negative attitudes about the water. If parents start their child in lessons later, it can be harder to get the child comfortable on his back in the water. It often takes longer for the child to get used to the teacher, the water, the distractions at the pool and submersion. An older toddler may have reached a “clingy” stage and is resistant to leaving the comfort of mom’s or dad’s shoulder. However, it is better to start swim lessons when a child is older than not at all because of the importance of teaching water safety to all children.

Sadly, drowning is fatal and final. Drowning is the 4th most common cause of death by unintentional injury in Canada, after highway deaths, falls and poisoning. The latest data provided by Canadian Red Cross and Statistics Canada show drowning as the leading cause of death for recreational and sporting activities and it is children ages 1-4 year who drown most often. The highest rates of hospitalization for near drownings were also seen in toddlers and infants. Many children are left with permanent brain damage due to drowning accidents.

Research has shown that swim lessons can make a child safer around water. A study conducted by Ruth Brenner and her colleagues in 2009 at the National Institute of Health, discovered that participation in formal swimming lessons can reduce the risk of drowning by 88% among children aged 1-4 years. The researchers concluded that swimming lessons had a “preventative effect” and “should be considered for inclusion as part of a complete preventive program.”

The goal for the combination of swim and water safety lessons for the 1-4 year old is for them to learn a swim-float-swim technique used worldwide to prepare the child for an emergency situation. When the child falls in the water, he is trained to hold his breath, kick to the surface and then roll over onto his back where he can rest, breathe and scream for help. Then he rolls in a horizontal position back onto his stomach and continues a swim-float-swim sequence until he reaches the safety of the wall or steps. There are inspiring true stories of children saving themselves in a near-drowning because they learned this technique or have been taught to grab for the wall or kick to the steps for safety.

And, there’s a big bonus for a child who learns to swim! It helps them get ready for learning and school. Scientific studies of young swimmers at the German Sports College have shown that early water stimulation helps the child develop: physically, mentally and emotionally. Compared with a control group that did not take year-round lessons, the children who swam consistently from infancy (three months) were significantly stronger and more coordinated when tested at 2, 3 and 4 years. The children also scored higher for intelligence and problem-solving, which carried over into excellence in academic achievement. Emotionally, they were found to be more self-disciplined with greater self-control and an increased desire to succeed. The consistent goal setting and skill achievement in swimming can help them feel great about themselves as they have fun splashing around.

Lana Whitehead started teaching babies how to swim back in 1971 and developed successful baby water safety techniques that are widely used today. She is the founder and owner of SWIMkids USA in Mesa, Arizona.Mrs. Whitehead has a Bachelor of Arts in Exercise Physiology and a Masters in Special Education, specializing in Sensory Integration, training children with disabilities, including signing to the deaf. www.swimkidsusa.us

How many times have you been told, “Oh you’re such a left-brain person,” meaning you think logically, are good with numbers, very analytical and so on? And upon hearing that summation, you long for the right brain’s creative, intuitive, artistic complements. Why can’t they be part of the equation, you wonder.

We used to believe the two parts of the brain work in harmony, but according to London psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, there’s a definite shift in our modern culture which favors left-brain dominance—and it’s something we ought to watch out for and correct. In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009), McGilchrist discusses the hemispheres and their different “personalities,” and then shows a sweeping dissertation on the history of Western civilization as seen from the context of the divided brain.

McGilchrist came to medicine later in life, following a distinguished career in academia. He is interested in a variety of psychiatric conditions, as well as neuropsychiatry. He also has a busy practice as a medico-legal expert and writes for numerous publications.

He named The Master and His Emissary after a parable that Friedrich Nietzsche told about a wise spiritual master who ruled a small but prosperous domain, who grew the land and appointed emissaries, one of which began to see himself as the master and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. The emissary saw his master’s self-control and restraint as weakness, and usurped his master, creating a tyranny and bringing the land to ruins.
McGilchrist likens the right and left hemispheres of the human brain to the master and the emissary of this story, respectively. McGilchrist weaves this cautionary tale to show that while the cerebral hemispheres should cooperate with one another, they have been in conflict for some time, with our current civilization in the hands of the emissary who, although gifted in many ways, functions as “an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart.”

Brain World: Can you speak to us about your theories on the divided brain which you describe in your book, The Master and His Emissary?
Dr. Ian McGilchrist: I suppose the first thing to say is that the subject of the two hemispheres has become an absolute no-no for any respectable scientist because it was so popularized in the sixties and seventies in a way that relied on some quite simple ideas about the separation between language and visio-spatial phenomena and between reason and emotion. And that is absolutely untrue. In fact practically every single thing that was said about the left hemisphere—it was down to earth and it was boring but at least it told you the truth—all that kind of thing is completely erroneous. I was intrigued by some fairly obvious differences that do come up in different contexts and I wanted to try to find a pattern in them. In so doing and in writing that book I was faced with a problem. When you talk about the brain as though it’s something separate from a human being, there’s a tendency for that to happen and it leads to the fallacy that there’s a machine in there that controls us. That we are somehow separate from this machine. That’s the problem with thinking about it as a machine at all. Because of course it isn’t. It’s part of a person. Our brains don’t experience things. We experience them. I need to make that point because some people who clearly haven’t gotten around to reading my book have put me in the camp of people who reduce the richness of human experience to a lot of physiological data and that’s absolutely not my intention.

BW: What was your intention?
IM: I had to really think of it more as these hemispheres contributing to a person’s experience of the world and as such there is no pre-existing way of describing this. You have to describe it using a metaphor of something and the closest is the metaphor of a person. It’s far closer than the metaphor of a machine. But in doing so you run the risk of people thinking that there are two people in your head or that half a hemisphere is a little person that’s got its own views. That’s also a problem that needs to be steered clear of. When you actually come to look at the data, they (the hemispheres) can be seen as having different goals, different preferences and therefore values, and of being parts of ourselves that have a different focus and a different take on the world. So in the end I make no apologies for making it sound like they have personalities because I’m afraid that’s the nearest way one can get at it without resorting to the “machine in your head” metaphor which is not a good one.

BW: Do the hemispheres work separately or together?
IM: Of course we’re using both hemispheres together all the time. There was never a time when all the activities were in one hemisphere. It’s more a question of what, at any one moment, is governing our actions and it’s bound to be a synthesis. It’s bound to have some of what the left hemisphere gives us and some of what the right gives us. Another thing that can be laid at my door is that I’m dichotomizing and I’m not. I mean there is a great vast dichotomy that nature put there and even though there’s a big divide to be accounted for, in fact these things were made to work together. We’re not conscious of switching. We don’t know what the thing that switches is but there’s a reasonable body of data suggesting that this sort of meta-control may be lodged very low down in the mid-brain which is the uppermost part of the brain stem.

BW: Can you describe the process of how these different hemispheres interact?
IM: The theory that the two hemispheres have differences comes from a simple Darwinian point. In order to survive we need to be able to do two things at once. We need to be able to be busily focused on something that we’ve prioritized is of interest to us already like the bird needing to lock on the seed against the background of the gravel or needing to focus on picking up a twig to build a nest. It’s got that kind of attention which is about manipulating the environment and using it. At the same time, if it’s going to survive, the bird also needs a wide open attention, looking out essentially for predators, not just in that threatening way, but also for its fellow creatures; indeed, for its mate.
Those two ways have somehow to be combined. And yet, if you do look very narrowly at something and bring it into sharp focus in the middle of your vision, it’s very different from the contextual penumbra of other experiences—intuitively-based, body-based, ancient and gathered from a synthesis of all your experience which you also bring to bear on the whole picture. So those two things, the rather narrow here and now moment has to be there but the rest has to be there too.
That’s why I think the two hemispheres have evolved in this way. They need to some extent to be kept apart because you can’t really do both things at once. It’s a bit like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time but it isn’t actually because with practice you can do that. You can’t literally have both types of attention, or at least it’s extraordinarily difficult to imagine how this can be done. Probably it’s a matter of keeping them both running and alternating. The two hemispheres are connected by a bridge of tissue called the corpus callosum which is commonly thought of as the thing that communicates between the hemispheres. It does. Although a lot of the communication is activating in its original sense—the nerves are stimulating something to happen—what they’re often stimulating to happen is in fact an inhibition. So their ultimate aim in a majority of cases is not to make something happen in the other hemisphere, but to stop something from happening there. And by filtering like this, things come into existence.

BW: You believe the left brain has been gaining control over the course of human evolution. How did this come about?
IM: I think an aspect of being a conscious being is that you are aware that you can become powerful by manipulation. Other creatures, of course, are competing and manipulating, but they’re probably not aware of the fact that this is a way of becoming powerful—that it seems to work well for a lot of the things that one does as one grows a civilization.
One needs to build structures by putting brick upon brick, or stone on stone. One needs to create drainage and irrigation and so on. One creates these things that seem to make life simpler, easier and better and make you more powerful. It’s enticing, and you can soon begin to think that everything works like this. Everything in your world seems to break down into a lot of machines that we’ve created. While this is a very interesting way of looking at things, it’s basically a practical tool for getting ahead. It’s not really a very good instrument for epistemology or for ontology—for finding out actually what the world is and how we know about it. It can lead us to narrow down the way we think about things to a merely rationalistic set of propositions, a series of algorithms.

BW: What are the effects of the left brain taking over?
IM: One of the interesting elements that comes out in research into the “personalities” or the “takes” of the two hemispheres is that the left hemisphere thinks it knows it all, and as a result is extremely optimistic. It overvalues its own ability. It takes us away from the presence of things in all their rich complexity to a useful representation—that representation is always much simpler. And an awful lot is lost in it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you need to simplify. For example, if you’re designing a building or if you’re fighting a campaign, you need a map, a scheme. You don’t really need all the richness of what would be there in the real world. But I’m afraid that that representation moves into a world where we have the ability constantly to interact with the world only as a representation, over a screen.
Even Facebook and social networking may look like you have suddenly have loads of friends, but what it may actually do is take you away from your real-life friends so that your life is more crowded and there’s less time, actually, to be aware peacefully of the world around you and to interact socially—a word that used to mean “with your fellow creatures.”

BW: What can we do about this?
IM: People often ask me this question. I think they’re rather hoping I’ll give them a list of bullet points—“The 12 Things You Need”—like a best-selling paperback. That is really a perfect example of the left hemisphere. “Okay. Fix it by having a little plan. We do this, we do that, and bingo!” But in fact, what I have tried to convey throughout the entire book is that the world, as it is, has its own shape, value, meaning and so on, and that we crowd it out with our own plans, thoughts and beliefs, which are going to be narrow.
A wise thing to do would be not to do certain things. Another theme of my book is that negation is creative. That by having less of something, more comes into being. So actually what we need to do is not create a world. We need to stop doing lots of things and allow the wonderful thing that is already there to evolve, to give it room to grow. That’s also true of a single human mind.

BW: How do you advise your patients in your psychiatric practice?
IM: As a psychiatrist I see people day in and day out who have problems in their lives. One way of looking at these problems might be that their minds are full of things that they feel are important, ways of thinking, and that it’s not so much that I can tell them to think differently. You can give people pointers, but the critical thing for them is to come to a realization that they’re doing things that are damaging. Therapy is always like that. Sometimes when I see a patient I have a pretty shrewd intuition of what they need to do. But if I were to tell them that right off, it would have no meaning. They need to find their way to it by realizing that what they’re doing now is not the right way.
One very practical thing—a recipe for healing for almost every one of my patients—is not forcing things to be the way they would like them to be, but to embrace the way that they’re likely to be and doing those things that will help that forward.

BW: It sounds like a very philosophical attitude.
IM: We are now understanding the benefits of mindfulness, which is officially recommended by the British body NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence). The essence of mindfulness is clearing your mind of all the stuff that’s going on in there and stopping you from experiencing life. You’re so busy feeling bad about the past you can’t change and chasing after a future you can’t predict, instead of actually being alive in the moment. That is really the essence of mindfulness. Recent research shows that mindfulness engages wide networks in the right hemisphere, and the EEG studies show that there is a more balancing of the two hemispheres in those who are meditating. So I think meditation and not doing things, making space in your life and switching off your machines, being present in the moment and practicing mindfulness would be a way to start.

BW: We often think about our brain in terms of cognitive processing, but the brain guides all of our activities from breathing and muscle movements to sensations and emotions. What do you think is the ultimate use of the human brain?
IM: I think that’s a terribly good question because it draws attention very beautifully to the fact that we are in fact not brains in a vat, but we are embodied beings. The cognitive processing model is mechanistic and sees us like a complicated heating system with valves and pumps and thermostats that switch things on and off. But one of the interesting things about the hemispheres is that the right hemisphere seems to be better able to take into its vision the information that is coming to it from what was always called the lower parts of the brain, the more ancient parts of the brain, and indeed, from the body. The difficulty with the cognitive model is that we think of the brain as a computer, and we think of memory as something like a data bank.
Memory, of course, is not at all like that. It’s part of the human’s whole world and is distributed in the body. In a way, you can say that the very muscles have memory. Memory is not something that is unchanging. It is contextual—and that’s a weakness of it in some ways, but it’s also very much the strength of it.
We now know that even something like the heart actually communicates with the brain and gives as much information back to the brain—in fact, possibly more—than the brain gives to the heart. Anyone who suffers from depression will know that you have this terribly heavy oppressive feeling in the center of your chest. The things that you feel in your body are of course experienced through the brain, but they then are seen and experienced phenomenologically in the body. Our bodies and our brains can’t be separated in that way. So although cognitive science is a very useful thing, I think it ought to learn less from the Cartesian tradition of philosophy and more from the phenomenological tradition of philosophy, particularly from the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, who is probably the single most important philosopher of the last century for those who are interested in the relationship between mind and the body.

BW: What’s up next for you?
IW: I’m working on a book with the possible title, The Porcupine is a Monkey. In it I describe an experiment done by one of the most distinguished living Anglo-American neuroscientists, Marcel Kinsbourne, with a colleague, Deglin. They were able to interview people with one half of their brain at a time desensitized. Essentially, they were addressing either their left hemisphere or their right hemisphere, or, in a controlled condition, both. They asked them what they made of false syllogisms. (A false syllogism is one where you give a couple of premises and draw a conclusion, but one of the premises is wrong. Truth is either what is consistent with your model—i.e., it follows the logic of your system, and it’s what’s on this piece of paper—or truth is what you know about the world that you’ve gathered from both reading, learning and living, all that rich mass of stuff that goes into your knowledge of the world, which we call common sense.)
I’m thinking of writing this book because you see such staggering examples of this all over our world. Clever guys with techie minds sold the idea that these things would work, and they now administratively run all the professions. Teachers used to create a relationship with their students by using the richness of their experience and knowledge of the world, often in idiosyncratic ways, with their infectious enthusiasm to fire up their students. Instead, it’s [been] replaced by, “You must do this curriculum and you must escort so many on this, and you must have so many of the following.” That is death to the mind, to the imagination, in fact to our civilization. I would like to alert people to that.

Becoming a mother is a life-changing event, bringing out hormones and natural tendencies in a woman that help prepare her during the nine months until the child is born. Nature has ensured that women are ready when the baby finally arrives, kicking and screaming, through a progression of hormones that flow through her body and her brain during gestation.

But what about the men?
“Parenthood is exactly the kind of event that you might expect to harness the brain’s natural neuroplasticity to help prepare individuals for the adventure that awaits,” says Kayt Sukel, author of Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex and Relationships (Free Press, 2012). “Given the sheer number of physical changes that a woman goes through, you’d expect that some major rewiring might be happening in the brain. But work in animal models suggests that dad’s brains are getting a bit of a reorg, too.”

Changes in Daddy’s Brain
Recent studies show that indeed, a few days after birth, changes occur in the brains of both daddy and baby, depending on whether daddy sticks around. According to research, not only do men get better at hearing a baby’s cry as the due date of their child approaches, but a baby’s smile activates the same circuits in the brain that are involved with falling in love.

“In a sense, you can place the changes on a continuum or curve, with the virgin male on the far left and the mother on the far right,” says Dr. Craig Kinsley, professor of psychology and coordinator of neuroscience at the University of Richmond. “The father would shift his place on the curve several portions to the right, never quite catching up to the maternal female, however.” Kinsley says it’s helpful to think in terms of parental requirements. In the mammal, the female gets pregnant and bears the primary burden of internal fertilization, pregnancy, lactation and, eventually and for a long time, infant care. The male’s role, for all intents and purposes, ends at fertilization, if he so desires.

“A father who remains to care for his young increases the likelihood of successful reproduction and a maximization of his reproductive fitness. Behaviors change in good, investing fathers. In mice, which are bi-parental—that is, both parents caring for young—the males show some changes, in brain and behavior, similar to the mothers, shifting that curve to the right. So in species where fathers do more than have sex and then abandon their young to the mother, marked changes are apparent.”
In a recent study, male mice were observed after the birth of their newborn pups. It was found that in the days that followed, a neurogenesis—spontaneous formation of additional neurons—occurred, but only if the mouse father stayed with his pups. If he was removed from his offspring the day of the birth, nothing happened. The study showed these new brain cells to be formed in the olfactory bulb—to be specifically tuned to the smell of his pups—and in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center.
But it isn’t just after the birth of the baby that daddy’s brain starts changing. “During his partner’s pregnancy, the male brain begins to release more of the hormone prolactin and to gradually suppress the hormone testosterone,” says Professor Louann Brizendine, MD, neuropsychiatrist and author of The Female Brain and The Male Brain (Three Rivers Press, 2007 and 2011, respectively). “Evolutionary biologists believe this happens because it is critical to the survival of human infants that the male parent be prepared to protect and nurture the helpless offspring and support the new mother, instead of chasing new females to mate with as in most other mammals.”
Prolactin is the same hormone that is responsible for milk production in the breasts of new mothers. “There have been a few studies over the past five years that suggest prolactin has a role in the paternal brain, too,” says Sukel, quoting Professor Ruth Feldman from Bar Ilan University’s research, which looked at a number of different neurochemicals that may change in response to fatherhood. Feldman found that higher prolactin levels are linked to exploratory play. The higher the prolactin, the more dads will help their babies explore and play.

Another important hormone is oxytocin, which is released in the brain in response to social and skin-to-skin contact. The higher it is, the more emotionally a father appeared to be bonding with the baby.

Finally, there’s vasopressin, which is possibly the only hormone that plays a bigger part in dad than it does in mom, promoting paternal behaviors and bringing out the protective instinct in a father.

“The hypothesis is that the brain is readying itself for the challenges and rewards of offspring,” Sukel says. “By increasing these connections and receptors, dad is primed not only to help care for kids, but also to better bond with them.”

The Father-Child Bond
Once a child is conceived, the role of a father, medically speaking, is finished. The dad doesn’t need to be around to give birth or to feed the baby. Yet, increasingly, research proves that a father’s role is crucial in a child’s life and that children raised solely by mothers tend to have behavioral problems as they grow up. “Many babies and children raised without a father in our modern world can grow up to be just fine; however, having an involved, committed father has been shown to increase the chances of a child’s educational success,” says Dr. Brizendine.
A father’s love, as it happens, not only helps his child’s brain develop better, but also affects his own. A recent study was done on degus, ratlike rodents who, like human beings, are biparental, with degu fathers behaving like human fathers in taking care of their young by warming, grooming and helping with their basic care. Researchers found that when they separated the degu fathers from their pups, the offsprings’ brains started to work differently than those pups who had access to their dads. Specifically, the degu pups who didn’t have fathers had fewer synapses in both the orbitofront cortex and the somatosensory cortex—regions of the brain responsible for decision-making, rewards and emotion. Researchers say this could explain why some children brought up without fathers or father figures find it hard to fit into society.

“We don’t know the exact neurobiology behind the formation of a [father-child] bond,” says Sukel. “Chemicals like vasopressin, oxytocin and prolactin appear to be important in mediating that bond, and are known to work directly on brain regions that are involved in both emotion and reward process—but how exactly they are working that voodoo, both together and apart, has yet to be determined.”

Nature vs. Nurture
Babies not only make their own oxytocin but also get it from their mother’s milk, a harmonious relationship that allows the mother-child bond to form. Research has shown that there is decreased release of oxytocin for babies who are not nursing; however, it is higher in infants who are bottle-fed in the arms of their parents.
Regular touch from either or both parents is essential in creating this oxytocin.

H.E. Michael E. Higgins, President of Ireland, speaking at the World Press Freedom Day Briefing

World Press Freedom Day (WPFD) was jointly established in 1991 by UNESCO and the United Nations DPI, within a conference held in Windhoek, Namibia. The conference supported the idea that press freedom and the ordinary citizen’s right to information is one of our most fundamental human rights and that governments must be encouraged to “provide the constitutional guarantees necessary for press freedom” and for the pluralistic dissemination of press information.

For more than two decades, WPFD is celebrated on May 3rd every year. The theme of media freedom continues to resonate, especially in light of recent events occuring in North Africa and the Middle East.

The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, opened with general remarks, asking for a moment of silence to pay respect to the brave individuals killed or imprisoned while covering stories. The President of Ireland, H.E. Michael D. Higgins, followed with a rousing defense of freedom of press and access to the internet for all peoples. H.E. Eduardo Ulibarri-Bilbao, Permanent Representative of Costa Rica and Chairperson, Committee on Information, warned against the adoption of the same new technologies and digital advances currently used by the new media voices of public citizens by the very governments against which they are uprising. The statistics tell the story with 21 journalists killed and 161 jailed. Our protection must not only embrace the dissemination of information and the free will of citizens against oppression but also the sister freedoms of thought, opinion and expression. To this end we must be vigilant on how to incorporate the new technology in our reporting, he said, further stating, “It is the challenge to develop, side by side with the spontaneous use of the new technologies by all citizens, a serious, reflective, balanced, legitimate and attractive journalism, capable of weighing and analyzing facts, verifying data, contrasting versions and generating analysis that rise over the emotional impulses, and are capable of generating rational inputs to nurture public discussion.” It is a warning to be heard as more and more “netizens” (public citizens employing the social media through the internet) join the media ranks in getting stories out to the public, sometimes despite barricading attempts of native governments.

Perhaps the most moving moment came when Giampaolo Pioli, President of the United Nations Correspondents Association read outloud the 63 names of the journalists who were lost this year.

A panel discussion followed, moderated by Mr. Mogens Schmidt who is Director of Field Coordination for UNESCO. Alluding to the fruit sellar in Tunisia who set himself afire and started the “revolution” in the Mideast, Delphine Halgand, the Washington D.C. Director of Reporters Without Borders told two true stories of “netizens” employing the internet to get their stories out to the public. Ian Bassin, Campaign Director and General Counsel at Avvaz brought us up to date on the advances of technology. He said that when the international journalists can’t go into a country because of repressive governmental crackdowns, Avaaz steps in to bring telecommunications equipment to the citizens. He urged that these 21st century tools be used to develop 21st century policy. The award-winning journalist, Amy Goodman, best known these days for her radio program “Democracy Now!” gave an impassioned speech about the freedom of the press to voice all viewpoints, not only those sponsored by corporations. She posed the question of what the reaction would be if for one week every media outlet, citizen on all the platforms available posted photos of the devastation of war. She ventured to say if done, there would be an outcry. When confronted with something that personal and that close, human beings tend to listen to their conscience.

Cogito Corporation, headquartered in Charlestown, MA, serves organizations responsible for improving the health and well-being of populations by delivering real time call center and mobile based psychological sensing systems that improve customer and patient engagement and detect individual risk of behavioral health problems in populations. Recently Cogito was awarded a contract from the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). In partnership with ICT, Cogito’s Social Signal Processing (SSP) Platform technology, which assesses “honest signals” or unconscious cues in natural speech and social behavior, will be incorporated into telehealth interactions providing clinicians with a real-time assessment of psychological stress, depression and engagement among U.S. Service members, Veterans and their families. The program will allow clinicians to identify when individuals may be signaling psychological distress by viewing the SSP data on a computer dashboard displayed during telehealth interactions.

I spoke with Cogito Corporation’s CEO, Josh Feast, on SSP and the research planned with ICT.

But just how do these signals relate to the brain? How are they mapped? The nifty diagram above which is found on Cogito’s website shows how the signals we see and hear are mapped to activity in particular parts of the brain. For instance if there is a boost in the volume and energy of an individual’s speech or movement, that is inferred to the autonomic system. Signals having to do with the attention system such as reactions relate to thalamic brain activity. When there is mimicry and/or a lot of nodding then we can infer that mirror neurons are at work. Individuals with halting speech point could be suffering from a large cognitive load, perhaps stress, denoting activity in the cerebellar region. When story, technology and science match we are closer to correct diagnosis and therapy. That is Cogito’s belief and the purpose behind their technology.

Mental health disorders continue to rank among the top health problems worldwide in terms of cost to society. In the US, depression affects 16% of adults, or 32 million people, in their lifetime. Depression is also significantly higher in people diagnosed with a chronic condition, such as diabetes, heart disease or obesity. Recent studies estimate that between 40% to 60% of individuals diagnosed with a chronic condition also suffer from depression. Yet it is estimated that a diagnosis of depression is missed in approximately 85% of patients. Through the innovations and partnerships of organizations like Cogito and ICT, there is hope for a reversal of these sad statistics. For more information on Cogito Corporation please visit their website at http://www.cogitocorp.com/research/.

The magic is happening from May 3-4 at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto, Canada with a jam-packed schedule of workshops, keynote presentations and demonstrations.

Brain Power Conference in Toronto was put together by a cross-disciplinary group of teachers, neuroscientists, psychologists and parents. Thompson believes that we’re starting to see practical ways that neuroscience will inform a revolution in childhood development and assures that the participants in this year’s conference will:

> Learn how a child remembers and how memory works and help them study

> Understand the impact of music, language on cognitive function – and why it can have such a big effect on IQ, memory and attention

> Understand how schools will start to bring neuroscience into the classroom (we have some great panels on the long-term impact on education)

“I think for us the amazing thing has been that schools, parents and scientists worked together to pull this off – a rare instance of multiple disciplines seeing the long-term benefit of exploring how neuroscience will inform the future of education and parenting.”

The more we learn about the brain—and we are learning more and more everyday—the better we can help our children learn and grow in happy, healthy ways. Thompson adds, “What’s also become clear is that ‘neuroeducation’ isn’t in conflict with great parenting or great teaching – in most cases, the science of the brain validates good old-fashioned common sense. It demonstrates that a holistic approach to a child’s development still matters, and things like nutrition or exercise or play don’t suddenly take a back seat to The Brain.

“Neuroeducation” pays attention to how the brain works and could very well lead to new and more successful approaches to the teaching of our children. Thompson gives an example of a mother who was concerned with her child’s slow learning of math skills. According to a neuroscientist, the neural connections necessary for focus and attention had not developed yet to the point where the child could pay attention long enough to “receive” the math concepts. It wasn’t a question of whether the child could “understand” math (a past paradigm) but rather of acquisition of cognitive processes as dependent on brain development.

While Thompson ventures that “neuroeducation might be upsetting conventional wisdom: how teachers give exams, how a child studies, or how a child is rewarded for achievement are all areas that deserve a second look as we come to understand the mechanisms of a child’s brain,” it proves that the capacity to learn may be as crucial and important as what is learned. And when it comes to preparing our children for their future lives, isn’t that what it’s all about? Knowing how to use their brain might be just as important as the information that’s stored inside of it.

For more information on Brain Power Initiative and the upcoming Brain Power Conference click the following link. http://www.brainpowerinitiative.com/ An Early Bird discount is available through April 30th!

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), with a presence in 171 countries, is making an effort to bridge the gap between rich and poor countries. Two main reasons have helped the growth process: the movements from rural to urban areas, and the spectacular strides of science and technology. In the last eight years, 500 million people increased their annual salary. However, economic progress is not correlated to societal happiness. Some people get richer and some countries get richer; this has been particularly true for such emerging economies as China, India and Brazil. But the poverty gap does not seem to decrease, and that makes our societies unhappy. What is happening?

On January 12 2012, representatives of UN agencies and UN country missions, neuroscientists, NGO leaders and global educators had a roundtable discussion at United Nations Headquarters, united in their conviction to eradicate poverty and achieve universal welfare. Co-hosted by the International Brain Education Association (IBREA) and the Korea Institute of Brain Science (KIBS), the event’s conversation focused on the human brain.

We need to look at “new dimensions of poverty and development,” said Georg Gray Molina, chief economist for UNDP–Latin America and the Caribbean. When talking about poverty reduction, “We avoid topics like shame, fear, empowerment, dignity…We have not quite put our fingers on these values in the UN yet,” he emphasized. Today we know that GDP and economic growth are not the only indicators of growth. He referred to Robert F. Kennedy’s remarks at the University of Kansas in March, 1968:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product…counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl….Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry…the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Dr. Elizabeth Carll, Chair of the UN NGO Committee on Mental Health, pointed to the link between mental health and poverty. “The biggest enemy of health in the developing world is poverty,” she said, quoting former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. There is no health without mental health, she continued. Mutual interaction between mental health and development can be positive or negative. People living in poverty not only lack financial resources but also have less education, are less able to access health services, face adverse living circumstances and are therefore more prone to mental disorders. People with mental disorders are more likely to fall into poverty, face increased health care costs and see their capacities decreased, leading to less possibilities for employment and so on. These trends happen vice versa as well—the better mental health, the better chances to either prevent poverty or grow out of poverty.

Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a professor at NYU’s Center for Neural Science and director of the university’s Emotional Brain Institute, corroborated this by explaining that the brain’s function includes managing not only thoughts but emotion. He said that if stress, fear and anxiety kick in, the brain freezes; and when these problems persist, it can become pathological. In those conditions, we cannot grow out of poverty. It’s like a vicious cycle, he emphasized. But the brain can change. We have the capacity to break those patterns or habits.

Indeed, Ilchi Lee, founder and president of the International Brain Education Association (IBREA), stressed that, “When people are in despair, they cannot take action.” However, he observed, citing his own country of Korea, so many people and so many societies have grown out of poverty, conflict and political instability. Why is this? Because they used their brains well. That’s all we need to do in order to solve the poverty gap. “Every brain has love, and every brain desires peace,” said Lee. “Even if no one teaches you this, it’s a certain kind of primal information that everyone has.…When each person discovers the huge potential of their brain, they become healthy, happy and peaceful.” At the same time, he said, we want people around us to be healthy, happy and peaceful. People realize that they’re truly happy not when they are happy themselves but when everyone around them is. And that’s when our brains are in a healthy, functioning state. “No country, religion or person can solve the problem of poverty,” Lee said. “It must be humanity. Every human being has a brain, it’s simply a question of how the brain develops and how society helps that process.” The important thing is for people to believe in themselves.

Brain Education, IBREA’s tool offered to the UN as a means to solve world problems, is a five-stage process of awakening the brain and achieving health, happiness and peace through breathing and meditation.
IBREA believes that direct financial and technical assistance from the outside will not solve the world’s poverty issues. People must change inside, they must unleash their brain’s potential in order for the changes to be lasting and to impact those around them. Only when people have that kind of self-respect and dignity can things really, truly change. Breathing and meditation are the tools for that.

“Sometimes there is resistance to these kinds of things, when it comes to applying them,” said Dr. LeDoux, referring to meditation and relaxation methods. “But I’ve been promoting for a long time that kids should be taught stress-reduction techniques as part of daily life, as part of the education system since preschool.” He sees this as a prevention strategy. “The UN should engage in this and make people understand that we can prevent stress before it happens, not learn it once you have the problem.”

In a stressful situation such as not being able to feed your children, one simple thing to help is to control your breathing. You do not need any money or other means to do that. Dr. LeDoux went on to explain how the autonomic nervous system that controls our body has two components: One, the sympathetic, drives the fight-or-flight response, and the other, the parasympathetic, slows it down. When you control your breathing, you engage the parasympathetic system and reduce the fight-or-flight response. This is something we could all benefit from. We don’t need yoga practices, or vast amounts of money. “When you breathe,” Dr. LeDoux concluded, “you can unconsciously control the situation by sending this message to your brain.”
The brain is so outstanding that it can learn just by watching. “It doesn’t require a special technique, you don’t have to learn it, you don’t have to pay any fee. There are so many things we can learn just by watching,” emphasized Ilchi Lee.

For those wondering about the real impact of what might sound too good to be true, Dr. Dan G. Pavel, MD and PhD, director of PathFinder Brain SPECT at the Neuroscience Center, showed the positive results of Brain Education on three patients. He used a brain-imaging technique called Brain SPECT to prove that the abnormal hyperfunctioning in their brains—showing anxiety, worry, etc.—decreased, and the underfunctioning areas—executive functions, finishing school, improving community life—increased while they showed favorable blood flow in their brains. A video about a Brain Education program in El Salvador also showed the audience the life-changing impact of the program on a vulnerable group of children in a violent area of San Salvador. Through Brain Education, they recovered their joy, their hope, their goals and their confidence to achieve them.

Mr. Lee reminded the audience that, in the end, the most important element in Brain Education is hope. When people are in despair, it’s difficult to take action—or, as Dr. LeDoux showed us, the brain freezes. If we look at history, many countries have recovered from difficult situations. We also see an endless list of examples of people overcoming adversity and being very successful. “What really matters is hope,” Lee reiterated. That’s the key to use our brain to its greatest potential. In the midst of hope, we create plans. With hope, the plans we set are clear and viable. And through the process of actualizing those plans, our greatness turns up and our brains begin to open up and breathe.

Lee went on to say that 2012 is a year of hope. In one year, 58 heads of state are being elected, and, with good plans and the responsibility of the people to realize the potential of their own brains and hold their leaders accountable, we can drive the change we all want to see in the world. The way to resolve the issue of poverty and to achieve universal welfare is through the spirit of all people and through using our brains well, he reiterated. “When we know how to use the full potential of our brain, we’ll create a new future.”

If you’re a parent, you’ve no doubt grumbled something about losing your mind. According to clinical psychologist Jonathan Baylin, who, along with Daniel A. Hughes, wrote Brain-Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment (W.W. Norton & Company), maybe that’s not so far-fetched. Most parents probably don’t realize the critical role the brain plays in caregiving—and that understanding the underlying neurobiology could radically improve the parent-child connection. Here, Baylin explains new ways to think about parenting.

Brain World: Why is it important to understand the neuroscience behind parent-child relationships?
Jonathan Baylin: The short answer is because parents are the keepers and sculptors of their children’s brains. Children are born completely dependent on our abilities as parents to care intensely, even obsessively, about their well-being, to pay exquisite attention to everything about them. There is a dance going on constantly between the parents’ and kids’ brains, much of it happening so fast that we aren’t even aware of it. Parenting well demands a unique combination of emotional engagement, attention, reflection, and self-control—a multidimensional process that probably takes more brainpower than anything else we do in life.

BW: How do good relationships promote brain development?
JB: Relationships in which a parent and child are often in tune with each other and feeling positive about the relationship are now known to be “brain building” and “neuroprotective.” In contrast, poor relationships can be toxic to the brain, both the child’s and the parent’s. Good relationships trigger the release of chemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine, chemicals that promote well-being, trust and pleasurable experiences. Poor relationships block these systems, instead activating the stress system and self-defense systems. Chronic activation of the stress/defense systems is now known to degrade brain functioning, even leading to atrophy of key brain regions including the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. Young children are especially vulnerable to the growth-suppressing effects of high levels of stress chemicals in their brains.

BW: So if a child grows up in a very stressful or conflict-prone environment, his brain development will suffer. Can that ever be reversed?
JB: The good news coming from the study of neuroplasticity is that the brain seems to be much more capable of change throughout the life cycle than was thought to be the case even 20 years ago. This research suggests that in most cases, children exposed to poor care early in life can be helped to recover and improve brain functioning if they are provided with sustained good care.

BW: Is there a difference in the brains of mothers, versus fathers?
JB: There are differences as well as many similarities. While hormones such as oxytocin and prolactin are triggered in women and men by the process of becoming parents, this process is more robust in women because of the changes associated with pregnancy, birth and nursing. Among mammalian species, less than 10 percent of fathers participate in taking care of infants. In those few species where fathers are engaged, the fathers have different patterns of brain functioning than the fathers in species in which no real paternal care exists.

BW: Parenting is typically rewarding and enjoyable when the child is agreeable, but it’s during the difficult stages that it can go south. What do parents need to be aware of during these times?
JB: During the times when children are naturally “resistant” to parental input, such as the 2-year-old stage of “differentiation” and early adolescence, parents are really challenged not to take the child’s “opposition” personally. This is when parents most need to have a healthy prefrontal cortex, or PFC, an “executive” system they can use to regulate their own feelings of being disrespected or invalidated. If parents can shift from their inevitable feelings of self-defense back into a “parental,” engaged state of mind, they have a much better chance of staying grounded, keeping their cool, accessing their sense of humor, and generally keeping their wits about them in dealing with a child’s healthy need to assert himself. It’s during these stages that parents with unresolved pain from their own childhoods or who are under too much stress can be easily triggered into overreacting and taking it too personally.

BW: Parents might not realize a sense of playfulness is important, not only with babies and toddlers but with kids of all ages. What’s the benefit?
JB: Play is a hot and intriguing topic in neuroscience because it’s being shown that animals who are deprived of play, such as young rats, have underdeveloped brains, especially in their prefrontal regions that are so essential to “executive functioning,” to self-regulation. So, play is a brain-builder. Playfulness also gives hope that the inevitable times of conflict are not permanent, that better times can follow strife, that we can still be “in relationship” when we fight.

Does a kid with a beautiful mind hold the secrets to the universe? In the new Fox drama Touch, premiering March 19, Kiefer Sutherland stars as Martin Bohm, a widowed airport baggage handler and former investigative reporter, whose young son Jake (David Mazouz) sees the world in patterns and numerical sequences but cannot speak. Jake communicates with his father in other ways, leading him toward clues that will help him make something happen, or prevent it from happening.
“Jake sees the world in a unique way, through a kind of mathematical lens,” says Touch creator Tim Kring, noting that the boy exhibits “severe issues” often associated with autism, including muteness and dislike of being touched. “There’s obviously something on the savant scale, but we’re not basing it on anything necessarily in the real world. What we’re saying is there is something mystical and magical about this boy. He’s small and frail and doesn’t speak, and yet in many ways he’s one of the most powerful people on the planet, with his ability. He may represent some sort of evolutionary step in our consciousness.” Kring’s premise poses that others like Jake exist. “It will be fun,” he says, “as you watch the show, to see when and how we introduce them.”
Each episode of Touch, which also stars Danny Glover and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, as a professor and social worker, respectively, will follow secondary stories taking place all over the world. “It’s very much attached to this idea of quantum entanglement, the idea of two things at great distances away connected to one another. One of the hallmarks of the show is that something that happens 10,000 miles away can affect the story here. As you watch, you’ll try to guess how they’re connected.”
Kring has explored the concept of interconnectivity before in his series Crossing Jordan and Heroes, and although he didn’t consult neurologists, he did heavily research and interview scientists “about the idea that there are recurring patterns that explain things in nature, that we’re all connected in ways that are much deeper and more meaningful than we even know.” But for all its mystical elements, Touch “feels very grounded in reality,” Kring emphasizes. “It’s a very human story about a father and a son.”

Myles Mellor is one of the top crossword writers in the world. Published in over 600 magazines, newspapers and web outlets. Over 7000 crosswords published worldwide. Supplying theme crosswords, diamond crosswords, syndicated puzzles, cryptograms, diagramless crosswords, word search, anagrams, and word games. Published on mobile devices and e-readers. www.themecrosswords.com 818 522 4126 10428 Jimenez St., Sylmar, CA 91342.

But is the new “attitude” sustainable? How can we make it last for more than a day or week at time? How can we make it a consistent focus, rather than a single day of celebration and repentance?

We can incorporate breath and earth appreciation together and bring MEDITATION to the campaign for earth awareness. Afterall, along with the planet earth, what’s the one thing we all share? That’s right, our breath, i.e., the air we breathe.

This year, Dahn Yoga and Body & Brain Centers throughout the United States, Canada and abroad with their accompanying internet platform LifeParticleTV.com are doing just this to combine meditation and breathing and Earth awareness. They’re calling it “Meditate and Make a Difference” because they believe that the potential for great actions begins with meditation and breathing. Where we find our big solutions is in our BRAIN. How we get there is through meditation and breathing!

If you go to their Earth Day website, you will enjoy two guided meditation videos. There is also information on how to donate to two earth charities–the International Brain Education Association (IBREA) that brings Brain Education to children in developing countries globally and Earth Shares CSA, a community organized program promoting local farmers nationally.

As an Earth Citizen, don’t you think you owe it to yourself to meditate and breathe in appreciation of your true home?