Cursive Is Not Dead Yet

The national education standards, Common Core, aimed to kill the teaching of cursive. But is not dead—just wounded.

Yesterday, I did a radio interview on WHO in DesMoines. WHO bills itself as the “America’s #1 Audio Company.” I remember fondly listening to WHO over the three years when I lived in Iowa many years ago. The Justin Brady Radio Show people had read one of my articles on why teaching cursive to children is valuable, and they wanted to explore things further. As many people know the Common Core standards did away with the teaching of cursive, presumably because it is not relevant in the digital age where children write by tapping a screen or keyboard.

My state of Texas, notable for doing its own thing, has refused to endorse Common Core, but still the state did not require the teaching of cursive. Now Texas mandates the teaching of cursive. In accordance with the state's new school guidelines, second graders will be taught how to write cursive letters before advancing to third grade, where they'll be expected to "write complete words, thoughts and answers legibly in cursive writing leaving appropriate spaces between words." When students get to fourth grade, they'll be required to write all of their assignments in cursive.

Justin Brady wanted to know what I thought about all this. My first reaction was this: “If we don’t need to teach cursive, why do we need to teach printing by hand?” Cursive is just a refinement of printing letters. Why don’t we just show them pictures of the letters and teach them to punch a key for the letters? In fact, that may well be the next educational “reform.”

We teach printing so kids can more easily learn their ABCs. We could teach ABCs by showing children which letters to tap on a screen. Maybe in some states that think they are so progressive, the teaching of printing letters will be on the way out. However, the reason learning to print letters by hand matters is that it demands mental engagement. A child has to think about the structure of each letter, and in the process of thinking about how to draw it, learns and remembers what the letters look like. Hand printing is an example of the “production effect” principle that benefits memory. We remember things better if we reproduce the learning, either by drawing, writing, or telling. One of the fundamental but unheralded principles of learning is that the best way to remember anything is to think about it.

Learning cursive builds on this principle and provides additional benefits. Cursive has two special advantages over printing: it promotes a higher-level mental development, and it can nurture a child’s emotions and motivation for learning and achievement.

Brain Development

Cursive should be easy to learn once one knows how to print letters, because there are many good books explaining the slight modifications needed to turn printed letters into script. But cursive demands more hand-eye coordination, a change in brain wiring that creates the mental infrastructure for many later uses in real life. Hand-finger dexterity becomes crucial in later life if a child wants to play a musical instrument, excel in sports, manipulate tools, or even master a computer keyboard. In my blog post that Justin had read, I had described how writing in cursive activated many more areas of brain than mere printing. It is training the brain to recruit neural resources to solve problems.

Excelling at cursive does another important thing. The learner has to pay more attention and focus on what needs to be done to make each letter and attractive. To do a good job at cursive requires self-discipline. Who can argue that kids don’t need to learn focus and self-discipline? Our multi-tasking culture is teaching kids to be scatterbrained. All kids have some level of attention deficit.

Learning cursive successfully also incidentally programs the brain for the habit of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a mental heuristic that enables a person to pay attention to the details of what is needed to improve a skill. If an adult wants to improve her golf game, she has to do more than just repeat a swing of the club. She has to think about what is the best way to improve the swing with each attempt.

Motivational Benefit

Learning to write cursive well has enormous motivational and emotional benefits. First, writing cursive is a form of drawing, and children naturally love to draw. The child happily takes ownership of their cursive creations, being proud of having a skill that generates such elegant writing. They can even develop a personal style, which is gratifying in their limited world that demands so much conformity. They discover that they have powers of mastery, which motivates them to do better in other school work. Of course, they also discover the practical benefit of cursive, which is that they can write much faster than printing, which helps them greatly in taking schoolwork notes.

In recalling my own childhood, I remember that I did not like school until the seventh grade. Before then I hated school and made poor grades. It may have been no accident that I started to like school and make all As in that year when I also had a couple months of penmanship class. I knew how to write cursive earlier, but penmanship taught me how to write cursive that was attractive, not perhaps as elegant as the script in the Declaration of Independence, but still something I created that I could be proud of. I still have attractive cursive today.

So, I say “hats off” to states like Texas that are restoring the hallowed place of cursive in elementary education. My only criticism is that second graders are not likely to have the brain development and hand-eye coordination required to create attractive cursive. Children need refresher instruction when they are older, as I was lucky enough to get in a couple months of the seventh grade. If a child does not learn to do cursive well, many of the emotional and motivational benefits do not occur. In fact, if their cursive is ugly and unreadable, the emotions are negative.

Aging Shrinks the Brain

In most people, their brains get smaller as they age. It is not so much that neurons die but that their terminals and synaptic junctions shrivel. A known cause is the over-secretion of cortisol by stress, but perhaps there are also other age-related causes.

However, shrinkage with age is not inevitable. Certain people are "super-agers," defined as adults over 80 with memory at least as good as normal middle-aged adults. A usually reliable index for decline in memory ability is the degree of brain shrinkage, specifically cortical volume. Brain-scan studies show that super-agers have thicker layers of cortex than do others of the same age. Thus, their cortex has not shrunk as much as average elderly or they had more to start with. It is possible that something about the lifestyle of super-agers protected them from brain atrophy. It is not convenient to know how much cortical volume the elderly had in their youth. But the second option has been tested in a study that compared the rate of cortical aging in 36 adults averaging 83 years of age. The investigators recruited super-agers and normal elderly and tested them in an initial visit and again 18 months later. Before and after cognitive and memory tests and brain scans provided a basis for tracking the rate of aging.

Super-agers scored higher on cognitive and memory tests than the average group at both the beginning and end of the study period. This suggests that they may have been endowed with more mental capability when they were young. But it also indicates that super-agers are more resistant to age-induced mental decline. The two groups did not differ in any other neuropsychological measures, education, or estimated IQ.

A clear correlation occurred between the two groups and cortical volume. The average memory group had over twice as much cortical shrinkage over the 18 months as did the super-agers. Some in the average group lost as much as 3.4% of cortical volume per year. If that continued over the next 10 years, they would suffer a devastating loss of over 30% in cortical volume.

Unfortunately, the study did not examine the lifestyles in the two groups. The super-agers may have just had good genes or may have been more mentally active over their lifetime and had healthier diets, more exercise, and less stress than those in the average group. Notably, some shrinkage did occur in the super-agers, on average at a rate of 1.06% per year. They still scored as well as the average 50-year old on various cognitive and memory tests. It is possible that some shrinkage is a good thing, reflecting perhaps a pruning of neural circuitry as the brain learns and develops more efficiency. Pruning is a conspicuous phenomenon in the brains of the fetus and infants as maturation progresses. Obviously too much pruning can leave neural circuitry with insufficient resources.

These results also emphasize that age discrimination is not defensible. Each elderly person's mental competence has to be judged on its own merits, not on a negative stereotype of the elderly.

Sources:

Rogaalski,E. J. et al. (2013) Youthful memory capacity in old brains. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 25(1), 29-36.

Cook, Amanda H. et al. (2017). Rates of cortical atrophy in adults 80 years and older with superior vs. average episodic memory. JAMA. 317(13), 1373-1375.

The Neuroscience of Why Children Play

All children, if given the chance, will play, preferably with other children. The games they play

are often creative, rough and tumble, and of course―fun. Some consequences are obvious:

·         Fun is a positively reinforcing emotion. It makes kids happy.

·         Play encourages exploration with fewer constraining boundaries than the drone of regular life.

·         Play is an effective way to socialize and make friends.

·         Play stimulates initiative and engagement, rather than passively observing what others do.

But there is another less obvious reason, one that is biological. In a review in the American Journal of Play (yes, there really is a scholarly journal on play), evidence is provided from controlled studies in rats and some primates. These studies show that when young animals are encouraged to play they develop improved social competence, cognition, and emotional regulation later in life. Play experience also makes them more adaptable to unexpected situations.

It is true that play is not a developmental feature in all species. The capacity (and need) for play is most evident in higher mammals with developed neocortex and that live in complex social environments. Play fighting is adaptive in predator species, like bears and lions that depend on aggression for survival as adults. In all species that exhibit juvenile play, play is a developmental tool that promotes the neocortical executive control regions to control other neural systems.

Play fighting is especially interesting because the juveniles must construct and obey certain rules. They intuitively recognize that they must not bite too hard, for example, and must give the opponent at chance to win sometimes or at least hold their own in the contest. The juveniles are clearly learning self-control, which will serve them well as adult. This reminds me of the touch football games that kids play.

Species that most obviously exhibit juvenile play are humans, dogs, cats, and ravens. In species where adults play, play can have immediate functions such as defusing social tensions and dominance relationships. Rats are an interesting case. They engage in juvenile play much more than other rodent species. Adult rats seem to exhibit novel mental capabilities, especially those involving social interactions that are not so prominent in other rodents.

When members of a play-oriented species are denied access to juvenile play, they can become dysfunctional adults. For example, rats raised in social isolation show physical and chemical deficiencies in their brains and they have behavioral abnormalities linked to impaired executive control function. They show excessive anxiety to stressful or fear-inducing situations. They over-react to benign social interactions. They are less able to coordinate movements with a partner, both in sexual and non-sexual contexts. They are less able to solve mental tasks. Similar problem are seen in monkeys deprived of juvenile play. Being raised by a surrogate mother is emotionally and intellectually devastating, but less so if the surrogate is robot-like and can interact in play-like behavior with the infant.

Juvenile play sculpts the brain to be more adaptable later in life. In modern human society, juvenile play is often obstructed by such externals as over-scheduling, too much adult supervision, and too many restrictions. The restrictions are often for reasons of safety, which is understandable in today's world. When I was a child, we had a lot more freedom to play, and in safety. It was not unusual in the summer time for a kid to leave home after breakfast and not return until supper, going alone to a park or neighbor kid's house to play unsupervised as we wished. Sadly, that is too much freedom these days. In this respect, the "good old days" really were the "good old days."

Source:

Pellis, S. M., Pellis, V. C., and Himmler, B. T. (2014). How play makes for a more adaptable brain. Ame. J. Play. 7 (1) 73-98

"Memory Medic's new book has just been released: "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain." Smashwords.com

Landmark Research: Why We Need to Get Enough Sleep

In other blog posts I have explained why sleep is good for the brain in general and memory formation in particular. Now a new discovery provides another reason for people to get enough sleep. The study examined a type of support cell in the brain, oligodendrocytes–let’s call them oligos for short. These cells wrap their membranes around nerve cells to form what is called myelin, which forms an electrical insulation in a way that speeds up the propagation of nerve impulses through neural networks. You may have heard about oligos in reading about multiple sclerosis, a disease that impairs nerve communication because oligos die and the myelin insulation degrades.

Speed of transmission is important–it influences IQ for example. As you know from buying a new computer, the faster processor speed gives it new capabilities your old clunker could not do. A similar idea applies to the brain.

Anyway, this new study, from the University of Wisconsin, focused on oligos because other research had shown that sleep promoted the expression of several genes that are involved in synthesis of cell membranes in general and those in oligos in particular. Unlike neurons, oligos die, and are replaced in the brain. Thus, anything that affects their turnover is important for brain function. Sleep has been implicated in this turnover because a common neurotransmitter in the brain, glutamate, is known to increase in wakefulness and decline during sleep. Glutamate  suppresses maturation of oligo precursor cells into formation of myelin insulation.

In this particular study, investigators examined a genome-wide profile of oligo gene expression in mice after a 6-7 hour periods of sleep or spontaneous wakefulness, or four hours of forced wakefulness (sleep deprivation). They found that 357 genes were expressed differently, depending on the time of day, in response to normal daily rhythms. More dramatic was the observation that 714 genes changed expression in conjunction with the sleep/wakefulness cycle, independent of the time of day. Of these genes, 310 were “sleep” genes that were selectively activated during sleep.

Many of the sleep genes contribute to maturation of oligos into myelin. In follow up experiments, mice were injected with a radiolabeled tag that marks the birth of new cells. Injection occurred eight hours before mice spent a long period of either of wakefulness or sleep. The number of newly born oligos was almost double in the sleep group compared to the wake group. More detailed analysis showed that this increase was specifically correlated with the amount of REM sleep (dream sleep in humans).

This REM effect may have particular importance in humans. Most REM sleep occurs in the early morning hours and only after substantial time has been spent in non-REM stages of sleep. Thus, cutting a night’s sleep short by getting up early may decrease the amount of REM time and thus the beneficial effects on oligo proliferation. So don’t feel guilty about “sleeping in” from time to time.

We might also think about how these findings could have special relevance to children, whose brains are incompletely myelinated. Getting children up early in the morning to start school at 8 AM may not be such a good idea. Until school districts get around to changing school hours, you might tell you kids about my learning and memory improvement e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort, available at Smashwords.com.

Source:

Bellesi, M., et al. (2013) Effects of sleep and wake on oligodendrocytes and their precursors. J. Neuroscience. 33 (36), 14288-14300.