kitchen table math, the sequel: teen brain - Jay Giedd

Saturday, February 24, 2007

teen brain - Jay Giedd

Adolescent Brain Development: Views from Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Jay N. Giedd, MD
National Institute of Mental Health
see abstract

  • Magnetic resonance images show that the brain's gray matter thickens during adolescence—peaking around age 11 in girls and 12½ in boys—owing to an increase in connectivity, and then "prunes," or thins down as adulthood approaches.
  • Although the brain then has more choices of pathways through which to send signals, those pathways are not necessarily faster, making some processing inefficient.
  • White matter increases linearly during adolescence, while the cerebellum also grows in volume.
  • Adolescence is the most efficient time for motor learning, when teens can aptly take on such activities as sports, drawing, and instrumental music.
  • Links between MRI data and behavior cannot yet be made, but that is the goal of these studies.

peaking around age 11 in girls and 12½ in boys

So I'm thinking that basing decisions about admittance into accelerated & honors courses in maturity might be a tiny bit discriminatory, you think?

As might be a policy of teaching accelerated and honors courses only the most mature teen can handle.

see: the girl show


this part is cool

Adolescence is the most efficient time for motor learning, when teens can aptly take on such activities as sports, drawing, and instrumental music.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great minds resonant magnetically alike!

Catherine Johnson said...

you're kidding!

did you find your Singapore Math thing independently of me finding adolescent brain??

I definitely found mine before knowing you were looking at yours.

Yours is a FANTASTIC find!

Very cool.

Anonymous said...

I've had it in "edit" mode for a few days now. I sent it through when I saw your post here.

The bar diagrams are a very clever way of making a topic everyone assumes is much too abstract accessible to younger children.

Sort of a nerdy aside: the Greeks too relied on similar visual presentations of topics for which we would use symbols. (a + b)^2 is represented using a line diagram in Euclid's Elements. And they used line segments rather than numbers to illustrate ratio.