Think-Thank-Thunk

Boys and girls are different. We all know that. You’ll be amazed at just how different, when you begin to dig into the current research literature. The following 12 book/article annotations summarize just what I’m talking about here.
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A new brain study suggests that children under the age of 8 aren’t really able to learn from their mistakes. This Dutch study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, illustrates that younger brains learn differently.

The brains of adults and 12- and 13-year-olds are more strongly activated by negative feedback, but the brains of eight- and nine-year-olds barely registered it and instead were triggered much more strongly by positive feedback.

Scientists conducting the study were surprised at the results. “We had expected that the brains of eight-year-olds would function in exactly the same way as the brains of twelve-year-olds, but maybe not quite so well. Children learn the whole time, so this new knowledge can have major consequences for people wanting to teach children: how can you best relay instructions to eight- and twelve-year-olds?”

If the player below takes too long to load, please just follow this link to her speech at TED Talks. It works great there.

You don’t want to miss her Stroke of Insight. Since she delivered this speech in February, this video has spread across the internet like wildfire. Her originally self-published book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey will be re-released (by Viking) May 12. Which also happens to be the same day she’ll show up on the cover of Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. And if that isn’t enough, she’ll also be interviewed by Oprah on her Soul Series Webcast.

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking this is pretty cool.

What do you get when you cross a science nerd with a jazz saxophonist? Apparently, a researcher with enough curiosity, talent and intelligence to actually video, in real time, the brain functions of people at their most creative.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to the story of Charles J. Limb, M.D., a researcher and jazz musician at Johns Hopkins University.

Using advanced MRI scans, Limb and his pals have recently taken some pretty cool pictures of the human brain during intense periods of creativity. Their mission: To measure the difference between a brain in a normal state and one rocking out during a jam session.

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A couple of weekends ago a colleague of mine related to me a conversation she’d had with some elementary teachers. The topic of the conversation was a specific icebreaker game called “blanket drop.”

According to these teachers, girls are always better at this game than boys. Hands down. No contest. They went so far as to say, “Never make teams of boys against girls for this game. The girls will crush them. Every time.”

They were emphatic that this is true, but had no idea why.

Understanding my passion for the topic of sex differences, she thought I might have the answer. Indeed, if you read the literature, it won’t take long for you to find the research that supports this observation.

But still–I wanted a little proof. So I tried it in my own room. Then, I wanted a little more proof. So yesterday, in a call for data, I shot out the following email to all staff here in St. Croix Falls. If you’re reading this, and you teach, please consider taking part in my admittedly unscientific (but still totally cool and fun) research.

Here’s the email:

Hello everyone,

I’ve stumbled upon a topic that is fascinating me: brain-based gender differences.

Recent research has shown some striking differences between how boys and girls sense and interpret the world around them. I think this is so interesting that I am inspired to do a little research of my own. I’m not replicating this study, so I’m not sure what the data will show. I’ve heard some pretty remarkable (undocumented) observations though–so I just thought I’d see if I might be able to back it up with some hard data.

That’s where you come in.

I started this “research” in my class today (8th grade) but I’m realizing my data set is way too small to be confident about my results. I also have some suspicions that age may play a factor.

So if you’re willing sometime, I would love if you would play this game in your class and keep track of the results. Many of you have probably played this in the past.

Blanket Drop (estimated time: 5-10 minutes). Here’s how:

1. Divide your class into two teams–boys vs girls.
2. Have two people hold up a blanket and have the teams stand or sit (sitting worked better for 8th graders) on each side of it so that they can’t see the other team.
3. Have one person from each team sit in a chair in front of their side of the blanket.
4. The two people holding the blanket, drop it (I found on a count of 3 works well).
5. The first to say the other person’s name wins a point for their team.
6. Keep a tally and email me your results. First team to 10 works well, but run it however you like. I just want the tally.

I’ve heard that, at least at the elementary level, girls are much (again undocumented) better at this than boys. I’d like to prove that out.

My limited results today show girls are somewhat better in 8th grade. Girls won 36 times. Boys won 25.

I would greatly appreciate if you could find the time to play this game with your students and record your results sometime before the end of the year. Like I said, I am very curious to see if results change as students age, so I’m encouraging everyone to participate. This is NOT an official action research project, just something I’m curious about. Maybe now you are too.

One thing that might also be interesting (though it didn’t occur to me to record this until we were done) would be if you would also keep track of ties. My 8th graders had a lot of ties. I’m thinking the number of ties might also correlate with age. But again, I really have no idea.

I will share our collaborated results in a weekly email as I get additional data.

Thank you in advance for considering to take part in my little experiment!

Chris

P.S. I have a blanket you can borrow if you need one.

If you’re still reading, I’d love to hear from you. Please try this game in your own room and share your results in a comment below. Or maybe you’ve had some other interesting experiences that illustrate (perhaps unexpected) differences between the sexes.

Like many, when I was younger I thought the world was my oyster—probably because it was something my teachers or parents told me. Today I understand that the world is nothing like a slimy mollusk. In academic circles we call this type of thing an “idiom.”

Still, we all want our children to have confidence. So, as a member of civilized society, I think convincing kids that the world is an oyster is good practice. Nothing bolsters the courage of developing children as much as confusing them with obscure idioms. Plus it’s fun to do with a grand sweep of the arm. Like this:

Civilized Parent: (sweeping arms dramatically), “Kid, the world is your oyster.”
Child: “My oyster?”
Civilized Parent: “Yep.”
Child: “Don’t you eat oysters?”
Civilized Parent: “Um . . . sometimes.”

Hint to Parents: At this point I’ve found that if you keep flailing your arms in an enthusiastically encouraging manner, kids will normally just take your word for it and move away—especially when with playmates. Which brings me to my next point.

Parent competition, or My kid is smarter than your kid

When my youngest daughter, Nora, who is five, gets together with her cousins, they always have a good time. But as an unbiased-impartial-civilized-parent-observer, I’m often struck by how different the kids are. Though very close in age, one of them seems strikingly more intelligent. She listens better to instruction, speaks more clearly and has a much greater vocabulary.

And since (again from totally unbiased perspective) the smarter kid belongs to me, I am drawn to this logical conclusion: I am obviously the better parent.

Recent scientific research, however, suggests that all this has much less to do with my parenting skills (and use of oyster idioms) than I thought. Nora and her cousins are the same age, but what I failed to realize is that in order to make a fair comparison, they also must be the of same species, and since Nora’s cousins are from Mars, obviously, they are not.

Nora’s cousins are boys.

Sure their anatomies are different, but their brains? C’mon.

The science (and thus teaching and parenting) of brain based gender differences is a very new field of study, but the research is piling up. Obviously, we all know that boys and girls are different, but we have only recently begun to discover just how very different they are. For years, schools (and parents) have been teaching boys and girls the same things in the same way, partially because we fear that to do otherwise would give one an unfair advantage in the battle of the sexes. We’ve been fooling ourselves.

Study after study has shown now, beyond a doubt, that boys’ and girls’ brains are very different. They use different areas for different tasks (language is just one example). They receive and interpret sensory input differently (girls hear certain tones a staggering 10 times better than boys). They develop and mature at different rates (brain scans of 5-year-old-boys look similar to those of 3.5-year-old girls). Their brains float (as it were) in different hormonal and chemical soups.

For 16 years Dr. Jay Geidd has been using advanced MRI imaging processes to map the development of kids brains.

“In general,” Geidd says, “we think the girls’ brains are maturing a bit faster than the boys’ brains.”

But not in all areas.

“Certain parts of the brain involved in mechanical skills or projectile estimations actually mature somewhat faster in boys,” Geidd says.

But What does this mean?

Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist and author of several books on the topic of gender differences agrees.

“Both boys and girls are being shortchanged as a result of the neglect of hard-wired gender differences,” says Sax. “By the age of 12, the geometry area of a girl’s brain looks like an eight-year-old boy’s brain. They’re four years behind. But the language area of a boy’s brain is three-to-four years behind the language areas of a girl’s brain.”

“Girls and boys differ profoundly in how they hear, how they see, how they respond to stress –and those differences are present at birth.”

said the night wind to the little lamb, “do you hear what I hear?”

To illustrate this point, Sax points to a study by Janel Caine at Florida State University that documents the benefits of music therapy for premature babies. What she found was that preemies who were played soft music in their hospital cribs grew faster, had fewer complications, and were allowed to go home sooner than those that were not played music.

But the most interesting part of that study comes to light only after you break the data down by gender. Do this and you find that baby girls who received music therapy in their cribs went home an average of nine and a half days earlier than those that did not. Boy babies, however, left not a single day sooner. Music therapy was great for girls, but did nothing for boys.

Similar studies have confirmed and clarified this information by documenting that for a 1,500 Hz tone (the range of sounds critical for understanding speech), the average baby girl has an acoustic brain response about 80 percent greater than the average boy. It’s no wonder girls seem to learn language skills sooner than boys!

“Patience. you have much yet to learn young grasshopper, er, I mean oyster.”

Yes, yes, I can hear you saying, but what does any of this have to do with oysters or idioms?

The trick for parents and teachers is this: Resist the urge to compare. If we are to have half a chance of convincing our children that the world is their oyster, we have to understand that each child has his or her own unique strengths. These strengths will develop in their own time. Because we love our children and want the best for them, sometimes this schedule may not match up with our developmental expectations. This is often disturbing or irritating. The answer, I think is to remember what oysters do with irritants—they create pearls.