Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Your Child’s Brain on Math

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
brain-on-math

Parents whose children are struggling with math often view intense tutoring as the best way to help them master crucial skills, but a new study released on Monday suggests that for some kids even that is a lost cause. According to the research, the size of one key brain structure and the connections between it and other regions can help identify the eight- and nine-year-olds who will hardly benefit from one-on-one math instruction. "We could predict how much a child learned from the tutoring based on measures of brain structure and connectivity," said Vinod Menon, a professor of ... Read More

More like this: Education
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The Audacity of Brainless Slime Mold

January 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

As any proud iPhone 5 owner knows, even genius takes a day off once in a while: When Apple decided to ditch Google and rebuild its popular Maps app using a proprietary platform, the result was a colossal cartographic #fail that still gets cited in Apple’s current share price travails. The sloppy coding directed users onto airport runways, into the ocean, and even inspired its own Tumblr. Brainless slime mold—yes, that’s the official scientific nomenclature—has no such problems. In fact, it doesn’t even have a central nervous system. But in a paper published last fall in the ... Read More

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More Evidence Music Training Boosts Brainpower

January 9, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Want your child to get better and better with words? Put a musical instrument in his or her hands. That’s the implication of a new paper from Germany, which confirms and augments research conducted in Canada, and Hong Kong. Across cultures, it appears, training on a musical instrument improves kids’ verbal memory. The results of an 18-month study suggest “a positive transfer effect from musical expertise onto speech and language processing,” writes a research team led by Ingo Roden of Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. In the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the ... Read More

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Speak, Memory

October 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

A FEW YEARS AGO, Captain Emmanuel Joseph decided to learn Arabic before his deployment to Iraq. “At first it was easy,” he told me. At his base in the U.S., he explains, “we had native speakers teaching us basic things like greetings; imperatives like stop, go, walk; and some numbers and nouns. It was very much survival-level.” In Iraq, Joseph (not his real name) continued trying to learn Arabic with Al-Kitaab, the main textbook used by American universities and the military. But he struggled. “I was forgetting more than I was learning,” he said. “With every chapter in the ... Read More

More like this: Culture, November-December 2012, Science
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Drawing Helps Kids Recount Details of Sex Abuse

November 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As we have once again been reminded, the sexual abuse of children is an ongoing tragedy, one that creates multiple long-term problems for the victims. Police and prosecutors often find themselves at a disadvantage; such crimes tend to take place in private, and the victims — many of whom cut themselves off emotionally from the experience as a form of psychological self-protection — are often reluctant witnesses. So how can authorities get these traumatized kids to explain what happened in sufficient detail to bring a criminal case against their perpetrators? A 2010 study provides an ... Read More

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An Unforgettable World Series? Only If Your Team Wins

October 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Fans of the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals will be anxiously following every inning of baseball during this year’s World Series. But how much will they remember about the key games five or six years from now? New research suggests it largely depends upon on whether their team won or lost. A study just published in the journal Psychological Science contradicts the notion we have sharper memories of negative events. Catholic University psychologists Carolyn Breslin and Martin Safer found fans of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox more accurately recalled key playoff games in ... Read More

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Eyewitness IDs Can Be Made Better

July 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A year ago April, Alan Northrop and Larry Davis walked out of a Clark County, Wash., courthouse on the north banks of the Columbia River, across from Portland, Ore. The two had just been cleared by DNA evidence after serving 17 years in prison for rape and burglary. The real perpetrators have not been found. In the year since their exonerations, Davis and Northrop have been virtually forgotten. They were convicted in 1993 based entirely on the eyewitness identification of the victim, who said she was blindfolded and never got a clear view of her attackers. Detectives eventually got ... Read More

More like this: Legal Affairs
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A Genuine Jolt to the Memory

February 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

It’s a universal moment of dread. Someone with a familiar face approaches and panic ensues; you can’t remember his or her name. New research suggests that this embarrassing incapacity may be helped by a shock — of electricity, that is. Scientists from Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania discovered that a low jolt of electrical current to the brain improved name recall in young adults by 11 per cent, according to a study published in Neuropsychologia. A subsequent experiment on older adults replicated the findings, and that study is being prepared for ... Read More

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Art and Alzheimer’s: Another Way of Remembering

December 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In 1995, painter Hilda Goldblatt Gorenstein — whose nom d'art was "Hilgos" — was placed in a Chicago-area nursing home because of steadily worsening dementia. Lawrence Lazarus, then a Chicago psychiatrist specializing in treating the elderly, remembers that she was withdrawn and sometimes agitated — so much so that Lazarus, a former president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, prescribed a mild tranquilizer. She had stopped painting several years earlier, as she entered the great isolation booth that is Alzheimer's. But one day her daughter, Berna Huebner, asked her ... Read More

More like this: Health, January-February 2011, News and Options
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A Really Hard Test Really Helps Learning

January 19, 2010 • By • 3 Comments

The first time Sarah Patterson got pimped by her attending doctor, it was a distinctly unpleasant experience. A medical student at the University of California, San Francisco, Patterson had just begun a rotation on the wards of the city's General Hospital. While doing rounds, the doctor asked her, in front of their entire medical team, to list all of the causes of atrial fibrillation — a kind of medical school pop quiz that Patterson and her fellow students refer to as "getting pimped." "I didn't know all of them, and I fumbled and tried to string together what I knew into a coherent ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Culture, Culture & Society, Education
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