by Sian Beilock
Some famous people have been diagnosed with developmental dyspraxia and have recounted the difficulties this motor disorder can cause. Daniel Radcliffe, the British actor who plays Harry Potter in the movie version of the popular book series, apparently suffers from dyspraxia and still has trouble tying his shoes. “I sometimes think, why, oh why, has Velcro not taken off?” Radcliffe jokes. He said of his school days, “I [had] a hard time at school, in terms of being crap at everything, with no discernible talent.” Fortunately he’s found his niche, but he struggled with the basics: writing and math.18 Motor difficulties lead to all sorts of mental difficulties, especially in the classroom.
The impact of physical development on intelligence is made clear in a recent study conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, DC. The team, led by the psychologist Marc Bornstein, followed 374 infants from five months of age through adolescence, periodically assessing their intelligence and achievement. The researchers’ findings were striking. The actions kids could perform at five months predicted not only their IQ at four and ten years of age but their academic achievement (reading comprehension and math problem-solving) at age fourteen. These actions included “tummy time,” when infants could lift their head and shoulders for several seconds at a time; when they could sit by themselves; and how often they attempted to reach out and grab the objects around them. The researchers were able to show that the link from action to thought was explained not by the parents’ intelligence or education level but by the infants’ physical capabilities. When kids can sit up by themselves, their hands are free to reach out and grab objects, which allows them to learn things about the world that they wouldn’t otherwise. Infants learned that their actions could change their environment, which helped shape their understanding of others’ actions and intentions. Even the language adults used around moving infants tended to be more complex, something known to enhance infant cognitive development. In short, action and intelligence are intertwined. The end result, Bornstein says, is that “motor-exploratory competence in infancy is a catalyst for adolescent academic achievement.”19
The link between acting and thinking can be seen in all sorts of activities. Fast-forward from five-month-olds to preschoolers. Most four-and five-year-olds can sing the alphabet song and print their name, but few can actually read. What does it take to push these kids to accomplish this cognitive milestone? Practice in naming letters and sounds out loud is part of it, but it’s not the whole story, or perhaps even the most important one. Practice in printing letters is imperative to reading success: when the body figures out how to write letters, the mind follows suit in being able to read them.
Karen James, a neuroscientist at Indiana University, found that preschool children who took part in a month-long reading program where they practiced printing words were better at letter recognition than kids who did the same reading program but practiced naming the words instead. Letter recognition isn’t enhanced as much by reading the letters as it is by printing them.20
James thinks that the reason printing practice is so important for letter recognition and, ultimately, for reading success lies in a fold of tissue near the bottom of the brain that is part of the human visual system, called the fusiform gyrus. The fusiform gyrus is where letters are known to be processed in the brains of adults. Brain imaging studies have shown that the left fusiform responds more strongly when English-speaking adults see individual English letters as opposed to Chinese characters. Scientists often assume that this letter specialization stems from our extensive reading experience, but James thinks that writing experience is the reason. After preschoolers took part in the month-long reading program, their left fusiform gyrus really tuned in to the letters. Most important, this letter sensitivity was much more apparent in the children who learned to print the letters than in those who only read them. That is, the brain area involved in recognizing letters didn’t fully engage until kids learned to produce the letters themselves.
James’s findings may explain why children diagnosed with dyslexia are often also delayed in their motor development. We often think of dyslexia as simply the tendency to confuse or transpose letters, for example, mistaking “b” for “d.” But dyslexia is a reading disorder that affects people’s ability to recognize letters and to separate the sounds that make up spoken words. If actually printing letters helps the brain recognize them, then the motor difficulties that dyslexic kids experience might play a big role in their letter-learning ability. When people can’t act, they have a hard time understanding.
Such body-mind connections once puzzled scientists, but now the link makes sense. Even though reading seems to be an activity entirely confined to the brain, it also involves the body. And since printing practice helps jump-start areas of the brain needed for letter identification, it is not hard to imagine all sorts of other ways in which motor experience can change the brain. In short, we learn by doing.
From Music to Math
The Breslins tried everything they could to help their daughter cope with her developmental dyspraxia. By the time Olivia was a toddler she was going to twice-weekly occupational therapy sessions, where she learned to balance on medicine balls, put her coat on a hook, and throw a ball. She also had speech therapy sessions to help her move her mouth and lips to make specific sounds and speak more clearly. Olivia has definitely shown signs of progress and, at six, is in a kindergarten program. She is still behind in her motor development, but at least she is able to engage enough in class activities to make it through half a day with her typically developing friends.
Olivia also takes piano lessons. It was her mom’s idea, after seeing how much Olivia enjoyed banging on the piano they had in their living room. Curiously, about eight months into these weekly lessons, Olivia’s performance in school markedly changed, specifically in math. Her ability to count improved dramatically, and her basic grasp of what numbers meant showed marked improvement too. Her parents wondered if there was a link between her piano playing and her math proficiency.
Others have wondered about a connection between music and math or even music and thinking power, often called “the Mozart effect.” A research finding in the early 1990s purports that listening to Mozart improves IQ.21 That discovery has since been used to support the idea that playing a Mozart opera like The Magic Flute through headphones placed on a pregnant woman’s belly will enhance the chance that the developing fetus will get into Harvard. A quick Google search of “Mozart effect” yields CDs, DVDs, and books detailing how classical music will make your child smarter. Mozart’s music has been credited with everything from boosting the milk production of cows to helping to break down waste at sewage plants.22 The former governor of Georgia Zell Miller even proposed including in the state budget $105,000 a year to provide every child born in Georgia with a tape or CD of classical music.23 Tennessee followed in Georgia’s footsteps. Eventually a small cottage industry of Mozart CDs for toddlers, babies, and developing fetuses sprang up.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there really is a Mozart effect. When scientists analyzed the results of almost two dozen studies on the Mozart effect, the benefit to IQ performance was too small to be significant. It certainly doesn’t hurt your child to listen to classical music, but it doesn’t seem to make him any smarter.24 Indeed the title of a recent paper from a group of psychologists at the University of Vienna pretty much sums it up: “Mozart Effect, Schmozart Effect.”25 Scientists aren’t convinced that even the small intelligence benefits of listening to Mozart that are sometimes found are due to the music itself. Mozart’s music is quite stimulating to neurons, and such excitement is generally registered in the right hemisphere of the brain, which supports many of the reasoning abilities researchers have tested in their search for a link between music and thinking power. Perhaps the Mozart effect that has been found is really just about being aroused or excited. In support of this excitement idea, it’s been shown that just listenin
g to a passage from a scary Stephen King novel also enhances people’s performance on common IQ tests—especially if they really get into the story.26
Though the claims that listening to Mozart can make you smarter are overstated, there are tons of cases of kids excelling in both music and school. Consider the daughters of Amy Chua, author of the best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which details her strict upbringing of Sofia and Louisa (Lulu). Chua wouldn’t allow her children to attend sleepovers, watch TV, or play video games because she felt their time was better spent concentrating on academics and playing piano and violin. By American standards, Chua’s mandates that her girls practice their instruments for several hours after doing extra academic work (especially in math) might seem overly demanding, but her methods produced two daughters who excel in both music and math.
The MATHCOUNTS competition, a national middle school mathematics program that promotes mathematics achievement through exciting and engaging spelling bee–type contests,27 regularly has winners proficient in both math and music. Students solve problems such as “If Kenton walks for 60 minutes at the rate of 3 mph and then runs for 15 minutes at the rate of 8 mph, how many miles will he travel?” (The answer is five miles.) All the members of the first place–winning team of the 2011 Los Angeles County Chapter MATHCOUNTS Competition, besides being math whizzes, play a musical instrument.28
Why might musical training go hand in hand with enhanced mathematics skills? It all comes back to the body. In the past several years, scientists have tuned in to the link between our ability to control our fingers (which is usually highly developed in musicians) and mathematical performance. Fingers and numbers share common neural real estate in the brain; the parietal cortex in particular is involved in both.29 Recent work shows that practicing with the body in music training helps kids develop their brain for math. The opposite is true too—several cases have occurred over the years of people who suddenly lose their ability to use their fingers properly and also to juggle numbers in their head.30
Take Henry Polish, who, at fifty-nine, woke up one day unable to do a simple arithmetic calculation or dial a phone number. Henry worked as an insurance agent at a small firm in Atlanta, Georgia, and was accustomed to performing mathematical calculations on a daily basis. So you can imagine his surprise when he sat down to pay some bills one Saturday morning after breakfast and found that he could no longer add a series of single-digit numbers in his head. He was alert, speaking fine, and had no vision problems. He couldn’t figure out what was going on. His wife suggested they go to the local emergency room, but he thought it would be best if he first called a friend of theirs who was a doctor. When Henry couldn’t remember the phone number, though, he relented, and his wife took him to the ER.
Doctors did a complete neurological workup on Henry and found a very strange pattern: he could speak and understand, move and follow directions, but he had trouble with activities involving his fingers and numbers. When the neurologist asked Henry to link his two pinky fingers together, for instance, he couldn’t do it. He just sat there, dumbfounded at his inability to coordinate simple movements of his two hands. He understood the instructions and knew what his hands were supposed to do, but they just wouldn’t cooperate. The doctor then asked Henry to close his eyes and began touching his fingers, one by one, asking him which finger he had just touched. Henry’s answers were no more accurate than if he were guessing at random. Henry also found it difficult to recognize simple Arabic numerals (for example, a “5” or “7” written on a piece of paper). He also had trouble writing the numbers when the doctor dictated them out loud. Henry had no trouble reading the alphabet; it was only when numbers were involved that he seemed to be at a loss.
A CT scan revealed that Henry had suffered a small stroke in the back section of his left parietal lobe, a region of the brain that plays an important role in number understanding; it also has connections with motor areas of the brain that help us coordinate the movements of our hands, like interlocking our thumb and index finger into an “O.”31 Henry’s multipurpose command center for finger movement and number understanding was down, resulting in problems for both.
Interestingly, the relation between fingers and numbers goes way beyond a shared bit of neural tissue. How we understand numbers in the first place is tied to our fingers, likely because we use our fingers when learning to count. When people are asked to indicate that they saw a number on a computer screen by pressing a keyboard key with one finger, they are better at doing this task when the finger they use matches their personal experiences of finger counting. Many people learn to count from one to five with their right hand, starting thumb first, and then six to ten with their left, again thumb first. For these right-handed one-to-fivers, recognizing a digit less than five is easier when they are asked to use their right hand on the keyboard than if they have to use their left hand. The opposite is true for larger numbers. How we count on our fingers as kids influences the way our brain processes numbers as adults.32
Using our fingers to count seems to help forge common ground for fingers and numbers. Children physically come to understand numbers through their fingers. The sequence of finger movements performed while counting helps children understand that each number in a sequence has a unique immediate successor and a unique immediate predecessor, except for the first. Beyond simple counting, we also use our fingers to keep track during addition, to point to objects when we are counting, and to represent cardinality (how many of something there are). A child may raise four fingers to show how old she is. The development of numerical skills goes along with use of the fingers.
According to the psychologist Brian Butterworth, a world-renowned expert in math learning, “Without the ability to attach number representation to the neural representation of fingers and hands . . . the numbers themselves will never have a normal representation in the brain.”33 Indeed children with poor fine motor skills of the fingers are more likely to experience difficulties in math later on. Finger gnosis, the ability to tell which finger someone just touched when your eyes are closed, at five years of age is a good predictor of math achievement several years later, in elementary school. It can even be a stronger predictor of math achievement than general measures of intelligence.34 The more finger dexterity a child has in kindergarten, the better her math skills will be down the line. The opposite is also true: poor finger control is often associated with dyscalculia, difficulty in understanding numbers and how to manipulate them.35
Because there is a strong link between fingers and numbers, developing better finger dexterity through musical experience can improve math skills. Just learning how to use each finger to press different piano keys can help. Children who have better finger dexterity can use their fingers more efficiently to count, calculate, and show numbers of things. As a result, their math skills are often enhanced. 36
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At one time or another, most parents wonder how their children measure up to other children their age. The comparisons usually start with early motor milestones. Shouldn’t my child be able to pick up her bottle by now? Sit up? Walk? It’s easy to spot parents, even the ones who claim to be laid back, surreptitiously sizing up their tots against the other babies in the sandbox. These comparisons only increase once school rolls around.
Understanding how the body interfaces with the mind provides a new window into how the mind develops. Musical training can be good for developing math skills and learning to print letters helps rev up brain systems important for reading. When a child’s motor system isn’t able to mirror the actions she sees others performing or even contemplate the actions needed to write the letter “A” or grab a toy, it’s hard for her to understand what is going on. Recognizing that children will have problems understanding what they can’t do helps us see how important motor experience is for all kids—not just for meeting those all-important motor milestones but for meeting the cognitive milestones too.
CHAPTER 3
L
earn by Doing
Although it is hard to tell by looking at their spongy body, sea squirts are members of the phylum chordata, which includes animals with spinal cords, such as fish, birds, reptiles, and humans. But unlike other animals in their phylum, sea squirts don’t keep their brain and spinal cord forever. They keep them only for as long as they need them.
The sea squirt starts off its life cycle as a tadpole-like creature, complete with a spinal cord connected to a simple eye and a tail for swimming. It also has a primitive brain that helps it locomote through the water. Its mobility, however, doesn’t last long. Once the sea squirt finds a suitable place to attach itself, whether the hull of a boat, an underwater rock, or the ocean floor, it never moves again. As soon as sea squirts stop moving, their brain is absorbed by their body. Being permanently attached to a home makes the sea squirt’s spinal cord and the neurons that control locomotion superfluous, so why keep them? A brain is an energetically expensive organ to maintain, even for a sea squirt. So once the sea squirt becomes stationary, it literally eats its own brain.
Although many psychologists are comfortable with the idea that the main function of the human brain is for thinking and feeling, the life of the sea squirt provides clues as to what brains originally evolved to do: orchestrate and express active movement. Daniel Wolpert, an engineering professor at Oxford University and winner of the famous Golden Brain Award, said in a recent TED Talk, “We have a brain for one reason and one reason only and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain.”1 And there is growing recognition that our actions and our thinking are a lot more interconnected than previously thought. Brain areas responsible for the ancient functions of navigating our surroundings and those responsible for the most novel functions, such as reading and counting, don’t operate independently from one another but have plenty of opportunities to communicate and influence one another. Often these functions are rooted in the very same bits of neural tissue.