Posts
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:
Great minds resonant magnetically alike!
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.
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.
Post a Comment