I have a negative effect that is occurring. When I look in the brain of a rat that has the same experience, I see a positive change occur when the bell precedes the meat, signaled by the release of this powerful neuromodulator. When I reverse them I see exactly the opposite.
The ability of the bell to excite the brain is erased. I actually see a negative plastic consequence. So we think of this as being positive. Another way to think about it is learning is selective.
The brain processes that govern the development of our behaviors are selective. Michael Merzenich: No. David Boulton: I spent a lot of time in the self-esteem world before getting into the reading world.
David Boulton: I think of it as a buoyant absence of self-negativity rather than a positive accumulation…. Michael Merzenich: Right, exactly. Again, it relates to the development of emotional control and these complex reactions that occur in the brain that govern, in this overriding way, the general behavior of a child.
David Boulton: The sum of our view is this… We think that children are being overwhelmed with a form of confusion that is unnatural to them and they are learning to associate the feeling of that confusion with shame. I love the description. Michael Merzenich: Right, right. The more deeply we understand the neurology the more we could understand how to drive true correction of it. I believe all these things are at some level accessible.
A big part of it is to find ways in the course of every kid in a significant part of their life and day to ensure that they succeed in things. As long as you have enough of those things happening in your young life you can accept the things someone else is better than you at. David Boulton: And the danger there is that it can be that the thing that I feel good about myself is that I can beat up everybody around me, right?
Michael Merzenich: Right, I mean there is that. There has to be things outside of that realm. David Boulton: All right. Michael Merzenich: Only to say that, this is a great quest. You also talked about the fact that each one of us is basically creating the complex conditions under which they are constructed and they are inhabiting our heads and controlling our behaviors in our life.
One of the crucial things is to understand this complicated interplay between these modulators and understand how they evolve — how plastic they are. People have studied the axis of neuromodulation. But still almost nobody has studied in any detail, or in any intelligent way, how this capacity, how this control, how this incredibly differentiated nuances of emotional control, as they influence learning and behavior are actually created and developed in an individual way and in an individual person.
There are high stakes in such understanding. Russ Whitehurst realizes that it is a weakness in the whole assessment paradigms of education. Michael Merzenich: Right, and not just for kids. I mean with a seventy, eighty or ninety year old this machinery is now falling apart and you have to think about how you can reinvigorate it, revitalize it, re-enrich it.
You know, we have to. There are things that are rewarding to them and can be made stronger and more elaborate and they should be. And guess what emerges when you get older?
What emerges is a lack of confidence. I mean all of these things enter in again in spades. It just basically shuts you down. One system gets feedback from another system to kind of build connections with. As a child as I differentiate my motor controls, I can feel the gesturing of my face in articulating a certain sound. I have to buffer up the context and work out their values almost as fast as I can possibly think.
Michael Merzenich: Right, the brain is incredibly good at making these almost real time correlations, and it can do that, does do that with incredible power within your every action.
Well, in fact, you never actually do that — hardly ever. So, your face, your anterior face and your tongue and your throat, are becoming incredibly specialized as you speak. But the machinery is made to do that. David Boulton: The brain is made to do that? But this code that is used today is only a few hundred years old. I agree. I concede. David Boulton: In that for some children, for reasons connected to the auditory processing that we were talking about before….
Michael Merzenich: Right, it depends on what you call an unnatural challenge. If you think of what I do in my daily life, almost everything that I do, that well-developed skill that I have did not necessarily exist, even a thousand years ago.
Pick up a spoon. Were spoons are a recent invention? Grab that bottle and drink it. Who ever saw a bottle a thousand years ago? I have to struggle. Reading is not automatic, I have to relate those letters to those sound parts. In other words, this is an incredibly powerful self-constructed…. Michael Merzenich: Right, I mean this is not something that just pops out of the brain. This is the product of massive, massive learning.
And so therefore, dyslexia, in a self-organizing machine of this nature, is an expected problem. It should apply very widely. That the more brain time it takes to resolve the ambiguity…. And as soon as you do you also have a decline in processing efficiency, the ability to hear something and rapidly translate it or to do anything with it has slowed down.
Michael Merzenich: Yes, absolutely. Yes, it is in a sense a technological artifact. Special thanks to Jennifer Ware for transcribing this interview. Skip to content An Interview Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
David Boulton: Yes, it did to me. Tweets by BrainHQ. Michael Merzenich. This is a monthly electronic newsletter that provides information about brain fitness and cognitive issues. Please complete the form and we will keep you up to date with the latest information, solutions and tips.
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