First thing I would say to you is I'm going to make a PDF available of everything I talk about. The reason I do this I try to practice what the brain research teaches and even though your early childhood people I'll say what I say to middle school and high school teachers. Current brain research is showing that concurrent detailed note-taking while learning often de-enhances learning. Did you get that? So we're trying to teach middle...
on high school teachers how to teach in a way that there isn't this grabbing every word and writing it down because that actual output of trying to grab every word and spell it correctly or put it on your iPad or whatever actually interferes with deep processing or deep thinking so I'm going to give you a PDF of everything that I cover afterwards the reason I don't don't put me in spot oh you have to for that video stuff huh the reason I don't give it to you ahead of time is? If I give it to you ahead of time, guess where your attention is? On that, and not on me. And it's all about me, okay?
Now, I want you to be thinking and kind of engaging with the information. There is research to support note-taking when, like I go off on a tangent and say some things that aren't up there, and you're really worried that you're going to forget that. Lillian this morning said some things that I wanted her exact words, and so I was quick to write those down. Research also supports writing down what we call ahas. Ahas are, I should do that on Monday, kind of thing, because ahas tend to tend to leave you and they're often markers of great learning.
And they leave you because the world keeps coming after you, after an aha keeps coming at you and you have to deal with it and then the ahas go away. So when I see you taking notes, I hope you're doing an aha. That makes my amygdala, that's the emotional part of the brain, that makes my amygdala sing when you have an aha. As we go along, if you have a burning question about what I'm talking about, please raise your hand.
I will stop periodically to answer them. Again, I try to practice what I preach. If I start out and I say something that causes you to have this burning question and you have to wait an hour until I'm done, it can interfere with your learning.
And so it is not good teaching practice to go on and on and on for an hour. an hour, an hour and 15 minutes and not to have the kind of conversation. On the other hand, you're here to hear some things and I can't let the conversations interfere too much with that. So I'll try to do a balancing act in front of you, okay? The 92nd Street Y will have not only the video of this, but a PDF available of mine with all the stuff.
But it probably won't be there until after Thanksgiving. If you want it on Monday. you can go to my website.
This is supposed to work. You can go to my website and up in the upper right hand corner is a word called resources. You click on it, it'll say conference handouts.
You click on it, it will ask you for a password because you don't get my stuff unless you've had to listen to me first. And notice there is no capital letter and no spaces. The man I fell in love with, Elvis won. Same as my bank account in case you're wondering.
you want to put money in okay so that'll be up as of monday okay and it'll be called 92nd street why real easy so let me go on this wonderful book is out there i'll be here afterwards and you'll see why i promote it not because i make money keep your day job don't write books to make money but what we're going to talk about is not joanne deke's opinion i have a lot of them i always say this i have a lot of them they're very deep-seated and almost all of them are right but in this next hour I'm going to try to talk to you without sharing my opinions I will only share with you what we have sturdy research to support and I encourage you to start doing this in your early childhood centers please don't just say at this school we believe please say we know from the research that young children blah blah blah blah need this or please start quoting research and start quoting brain imaging because we're now at a point where belief will get us into trouble and we'll argue back and forth with parents example if you don't drink water Even for an hour, it starts to deplete some of the neurotransmitter fluid, and your brain will start to lose some of its power. So schools that say you can't drink water in class are going to be sued. And whether you believe it's a good idea or not, you better allow it, you see.
Neurotransmitter fluid enhancement. Next example. Some of you are slouching back and putting your head back. In my class you're not allowed to do that.
You're adults so I can't affect you that much but the reason you're not allowed to do it in my class, the brain actually listens to your body and if you're leaning back like this, in general it's telling your brain that what is happening isn't that important and you're tired. and you won't actually think as well. So I do ask kids not to do that kind of thing.
Let me give you a preview of the main points that I want to make in case you're going to miss the overall gist of it. I'm assuming that you can read the words from where you are. If you can't read what's up here please move for your visual acuity because I won't read everything that's up there. That's really not good teaching practice is it? By the way to me neurologic unit means a human being.
So you come in with some hard wiring. Luckily, you don't have to live with it. Spelling was hard for my older brother.
It was a piece of cake for me. I got neurons in different places than he did. But he was a good boy, and he worked hard, and he became an exquisite speller. I didn't have to work at all, and I won the spelling bee in the state of Ohio during my growing up years. Isn't that fun?
So you have plasticity. The issue is that plasticity or being able to change what you come into the world with in your brain has windows. The brain was designed for different age periods for different parts of the brain to be very stretchy and if you use it during that stretchy time you get more bang for the buck.
So I'm going to talk a lot about the windows in the first five years because that's what I was told to talk about. I like to talk about the whole magic decade, but I'll just limit myself to five because what seems to happen is every decade when I do that, that means I want you to pay attention to what I'm saying. And if this is up here, some people are actually paying attention to that. Do you believe it?
another teaching technique so about every decade the brain changes rather dramatically what areas are at peak plasticity I have a new book coming out the first week of March written for adolescents because there are four or five areas of the brain that are newly very plastic that really need to be used in that second decade and they're somewhat different from the first decade so what we're trying to do in the brain world is make an alignment between the age ranges that you deal with and what areas are hitting windows of plasticity by the way it's kind of hard to see in the back so if you're raising your hand in the back you should hoop and holler too and that will get my attention. So I consider everybody in this room a neurosculptor of the children and human beings that you work with, because what happens during these windows lasts a lifetime. And if you think you're only affecting this child during the year or two that you have them, you should get out of this business and go be a FedEx driver, because you're affecting these human beings forever.
And knowing that, those are the kind of human beings we want. as early childhood educators. I wanted to show you how early the brain comes in with some hard wiring.
This is a very quick video. It shows some one of you asked about gender differences in the brain before I started. This shows gender differences and temperament differences and hard wiring and what we call the low road or the bottom part of the brain where instinct and motivation and a whole variety. of things are. So if we could dim the lights a little bit.
It's very fast so watch quickly and may I just say you're gonna get an urge to laugh. If you do laugh lightly because you'll cover up one of the words I want you to hear. Boys and girls are not the same. At Rutgers Medical School, the researchers like to get their human guinea pigs young before the world has left its mark on them.
Extensive tests have shown that a sex difference in temperament shows up early. Babies are seated in front of a screen and given a string they can pull to change the picture in front of them. Boys and girls learn equally fast, but they react differently when the switch they've learned to control is secretly disconnected.
The boys keep pulling harder and harder, but with the girls it's different. They get upset and give up. The difference shows in babies as young as six weeks.
Isn't that something? Let me make sure you heard some of this. There's no significant difference in how cool you are.
quickly by gender the babies learned that it didn't work. Let me also confess to you, this is an old video, in case you didn't notice by the size of the computer and the hairstyles. But it's the fastest, easiest way to show you this.
What we call temperament and gender differences in temperament is very hardwired, harder to change even than learning style. But I wanted to take this opportunity to talk to you about brand new brain research. Not all boys kept going.
In fact, one of the boys, after using one hand and the other, actually used a foot, you know, kind of thing. Not all of the girls showed immediate distress. Ah! But at about the 80% level, we saw that kind of dramatic difference.
By age six weeks, these human beings don't even know what they have below the waist. They don't know if they're boys or girls, but they showed stark gender patterns. New brain research, if we had time to talk about all of this, we see more of what we call a gender spectrum in the brain.
Not just male and female, but go on genderspectrum.org, and it has all the latest. research that is rather stunning. We can actually tell by looking at most brain images where you fall on the gender spectrum. If you are homosexual or heterosexual or transsexual, isn't this interesting?
Woohoo, from babyhood. But that's very new research and it's not being done yet. But let me just say that the upper part of the brain, the learning style, when you, we have what I call 80% of the brain is not being used.
percenters and 20 percenters. 80 percenters are boys, 80 percent boys, who follow a stereotypic pattern with a range of difference. For instance, most boys are born with more spatial visual neurons than most girls. Ha ha!
Most girls are born with more language acquisition neurons than most boys. That's in the top part, the thinking part of the brain. About 20% on the gender spectrum have more of a brain that is more of, here's the clinical term, more of a mush.
Kind of a mixture of both. It has somewhat to do with how much estrogen and testosterone flowed through the brain. in utero. So there's a gender spectrum and whether you're an 80 percenter or a 20 percenter, you didn't get to decide. And not all 20 percenters, please don't hear me, did I say are homosexual or transsexual.
The large majority just have a learning style a bit more like the other gender. Okay, yes. Rather than explaining what she just asked, let me just try to say this again in a clearer way because this is very complex information. I'm talking about 80% of boys and 80% of girls, not 80% of the brain. 80% of boys, for instance, language processing in a girl brain is on both sides.
In a boy brain is only on the left side. You're born. a male or female from the neck up.
Okay, and if you follow the 80% of boys pattern, you'll have less neurons than 80% of girls, but 20% of boys Might have as many neurons in the language areas as girls, but they might not have all the girl stuff Do you see they're more in the middle? So it's a percentage of people you're born somewhere on the gender spectrum And when you come out of the birth canal where you're born on the gender spectrum is a done deal That doesn't mean that I can't take a girl who didn't have as many spatial visual neurons as boys early on and change her. That's why I use rubber bands.
So from a quick way of saying it standpoint. Just a quick way of saying it. In general, if you talk about sectors in the brain as being rubber bands to show size, in general, for a girl, the parts that go together to do language acquisition, are slightly bigger than a boy. That's hard wiring. But then that's why we want you to talk to boys so much and not just have them do game boys, which take the natural part of their gender brain and exacerbate it.
We want them to talk and listen to all the things that Lydia said and read to them because we can change that. And if we do that early with boys, they can go nose to nose with girls as they go on. Girls are born, if you will, if you're an 80% girl, with slightly less language neurons in the spatial areas than boys. It's critical for them early on to do a lot of block building.
Do you see what I'm doing? And so. And so part of what I'm going to say to you when we get to gender, let me see how fast it's coming up. Very fast. I'm going to say this.
I want you to vip-vop children early. What in the world does vip-vop mean? I've been working in the Netherlands.
They do a lot with gender spectrum. Vip-vop is the Dutch word. I learned very quickly they don't speak English in the Netherlands.
And I was trying to talk about teeter-totter or balancing out a brain, regardless of what it is. If I'm not good at spatial stuff early, hit it hard. okay and balance me out I'm not good at language stuff early hit it hard during the peak plasticity and balance me out so VIP bop means balance or go on the other end of the continuum and that's what it means in Dutch so I want you to go against somewhat the gender grain that comes out of the birth canal because every brain will use every part so stay with me on this okay I wanna go back remember the girl and boy video.
It actually makes me sick to my stomach because new research is showing there's a part of the brain called the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex, that only gets activated when you make a mistake, not when you do something correctly. And it actually enhances brain growth, learning, and memory. The only word I remember and all the spelling bees I was ever in was the one that I missed.
Because the ACC goes off. when you muck about and struggle and don't quite get the answer right away or give a wrong answer and it smacks you in the head and goes learn this it's important we think it's left over from species survival but remember the little boy baby he kept trying and when one hand didn't work he used another when the other hand didn't work he used his foot what did the girl baby do she went Here's what I'm talking about. We see no significant difference in intelligence early on between girl and boy babies.
But after 20 years of following that pattern, of keeping trying, keeping at it, trying different things, and the girl stopping until somebody hands her the answer, by age 20 we do see a significant difference in problem solving in male and female brains, unless we've VIP-vopped them early. And so one reason that book is out there is because, this isn't a promotion for that, but watch the words I circle. We want to teach kids about what they come into the world with and how they can use their plastic brain to go against it. We want to teach them about their brain.
So what we're trying to teach kids and their parents is that your brain is plastic. It's especially plastic during certain years and you don't have to live with what you have and if something presently is hard for you to do or you really don't want to do it, you avoid it, that's usually a sign that that part of your brain isn't as big as it will need to be to be effective in life. And now's the time to go against it and not just do it. do what you like or feels good.
I often speak at Montessori conferences, and my topic is, what would Maria have changed if she had the brain research in front of her? And when the Montessori approach says that you need to follow the child, what it means is this. You need to follow the child and observe and understand. And when you see something like language acquisition that has a bump in it, do something about it while the brain is still very stressed.
In other words, vip-vop it. And I've said to you over and over, you're neurosculptors. Literally, the amount of time that kids spend on certain things changes their brain forever. And the amount of time they avoid doing certain things actually causes those parts of the brain to shrivel.
Isn't that something? So then the question, and I do want you to read this article by Dan Siegel, and it talks about this. So the question becomes, what are the windows? The reason the first five years are called the formative years, and they've been called that forever, is because when the brain comes out, it's not all formed, and literally what it does and doesn't do in the first five years of life formats it forever and gets it. ready for use and also makes certain parts muscular, to use a metaphor.
The brain's an organ but it acts like a muscle. And what is used in the first five years of life muscularizes it forever. or converse like if i put my arm in a in a cast for five years and then i take it out and i haven't used this muscle what has happened to it it's diminished isn't it and this one that i used over and over and over look how big it got little boys who play game boys for five and six hours a day the visual part is getting stretched guess what's happening to the auditory input auditory processing, language attention.
It's actually shriveling. We're actually causing some learning disabilities by not hitting the windows at a particular time. So what do I mean by a window?
It's a critical time but it's limited. It's designed when a when neurons become what we call ready, you know readiness, when an area is ready for the next several years it's at an uber stage. of plasticity and that's when you want to jump in with both feet and what happens then if you use it during that window time you get more bang for the buck i assume that you all know what that means sometimes when i'm speaking in other countries i have to explain that americanism but if i say anything that you don't understand let me know and then the other thing a window does is if you use it enough during a window it keeps the plasticity pretty much alive forever Let me give an example. If you learn how to play an instrument enough, not just for a day or so, but if you learn to play an instrument before age 10, and even if you quit for 30 years...
When you go back to playing it, those parts of your brain will still have good elasticity. But if you don't do it before age 10, or like me, you play it for three months, the clarinet sounded like a wounded Canada goose, and you quit. Now I'm 64. My brain remains plastic, but not as plastic.
Now if I go to play the clarinet, I can actually make it play tunes, but I can never get where I would have gotten. if I had used it during a window. Do you see how important you are?
And many of the most important windows are in the first five years. That's why early childhood teachers should be making more money than NFL football players. You have to elect me God or Allah first.
So it keeps the power throughout life. It doesn't keep the skill set. It keeps the plasticity of growing and use.
That's different, isn't it? Example again I'll give, if I've never been on a bicycle and somebody gives me one when I'm 64, you better buy me a lot of pads, okay? Because I'm going to be falling a lot and I'm never going to be really adept. But if I learn to ride a bike when I'm five.
and I become expert and then I move to, I don't know, someplace in the world that doesn't have bicycles and then I come back when I'm 64 and you give me a bike, you won't have to buy me many pads. I'll wobble for a little bit but I'll get right, do you see what happens? The plasticity was kept alive. Now are you seeing how important you are early childhood people? Lord.
If you don't use enough during a window, the opposite happens. The brain begins to fossilize. If you don't use part of the brain during a window, the brain goes, guess this isn't going to be important because this is the time it's supposed to be used. Therefore, I'll just start to make it lose its plasticity and put that plasticity elsewhere. Example, birth to three is the window for hearing.
Your native language. If you interfere with hearing language from birth to three enough, you lower the gradient of language learning for the rest of your life. How much depends on how much the interference was. So if you lock a child in a closet for a year when they're two, then you take them out and you just talk to them and put them in a great language rich environment, they will keep improving in language but they will never get to the same high. That's the danger of missing a window.
I'm going to modulate this a bit for those of you who are going to go out and smack kids around and get them to use these windows a lot, but hear what I'm saying about this. Yes. She's asking about foreign language. The window for foreign language is birth to eight and I will give you all the research and brain imaging to look at to prove it. So what the research says is you have between birth and eight to hear a foreign language to keep the Alaska elasticity alive.
What you keep alive is the sound system, as Lydia said, not the words. So if you hear a tonal language, you don't have to say it, but if you hear it enough that it starts to make sense, by eight you can when you're 40 like I did and went to China I could probably pick up a lot of Mandarin I grew up in the 50s in Ohio in a little Midwestern town I did not hear one word of atonal language during that time oh surprise and when I tried to learn Mandarin at age 40 I couldn't even hear the words I had to lean forward and watch how the mouth moved so it's the sound system I thought I was gonna grow up and only need to be monolingual. That was the 50s in Ohio.
But I could learn Spanish now decently well because the sound system for Spanish is not that different from English, is it? But Dutch, good Lord, good... forget that kind of thing.
I didn't say it totally fossilizes, but it loses elasticity. And when we brain image people who miss the foreign language hearing window, when they learn a foreign language, that they didn't hear the sound system of earlier. When we brain image them, they actually don't just use primary language acquisition centers. They use many more auxiliary centers because the brain is so frustrated and is having such a hard time. that you have to use many more.
And you will never hear it and speak it with the same nuance. So foreign languages, you have a wider band. But I'm going to talk a little bit more about that when I show you the video for it, okay?
Yes? Yeah, I so love and hate that question. Look, remember what I said, the parts, well, here, let me use my brother and me as an example, okay?
Here's me, here's my brother, okay? The parts of the brain that go together to do spelling, let's just talk about that. I'll tell you what they are pretty soon. For whatever reason, I got millions of neurons.
My hard wiring in that. was neuronally rich. My brother who has the same IQ I do, he thinks, got this in spelling, okay.
Enough for me wasn't much because I had so many they proliferate so fast, the ends called dendrites. So enough for me wasn't much but for him enough had to be longer, more, more time spent. So enough has to do somewhat with your formatting.
For somebody who has predisposition for language talent, they don't need to hear it enough. For somebody who doesn't, you need to hear it a lot and that's enough for you. And that's what makes enough a really hard word.
I wanted to write a book entitled Enough. Do you know how many books are written in that? At last count, 15. So I didn't write it.
So enough has is very hard to describe. All we know is that the more you hit it in a window, the less enough is. And the harder it is for you during that window, the longer enough is.
Does that help you at all? Does it help you enough? I couldn't resist. That's the best I can do. I'm sorry.
So what I want you to understand is that the brain goes through periods of spurts and plateaus, spurts and plateaus. This is why letter grading is a problem, because if you're spurting and somebody else has plateaued, you're not going to get as good a grade or whatever in that evaluation and measurement, you see. And everybody spurts and plateaus operate at different timelines. A spurt is called proliferation. A plateau is a time of pruning and making those neurons more fat and muscular, okay?
Kind of taking strings and making them ropes. So it's consolidating what you've learned. So you get a spurt of learning and then a plateau of consolidation, then a spurt of learning and a plateau of consolidation. You go through these spurts and plateaus and they have something to do with the windows.
Let me give you the first one. The first wave of proliferation is the second trimester in utero. Why do I bring this up? Do not mess with the brain. during a time period of proliferation.
In the second trimester of life, the brain stem is growing up into this huge, beautiful thing called a brain. If a mother doesn't eat enough protein during that time, she drinks too much, she's under too much stress, the brain won't proliferate as much. And we have periods of proliferation until we're 40-ish. So you don't mess with the brain when it's proliferating. Then it's quickly followed by a period of consolidation or pruning.
The first one is the third trimester of pregnancy. So the first trimester of Joanne's fetal brain, all this beautiful neuronal richness comes up, and the third trimester, I become little Joanne. Don't prune the back of my head where visual memory is, because I got a piece of great-grandma's... photographic memory which allows me to be able to spell a word when I see it once. You see?
But my brother Marty didn't get great-grandmas so he's got pruned more. You see what happens? This is where we think between these two proliferation and pruning that a good deal of autism happens. So that's a big long topic but my point is anything that interferes with proliferation or pruning If I stop doing something when I come out into the world, not now, but during a stage of pruning when I come out into the world, if I stop doing something for a long period of time, it actually gets pruned way back. You see why this is not a time?
If I stop doing something for a long period of time during proliferation, it never gets as big. If I stop doing something during a time of pruning, it gets cut back too much. So now let's look at these as we enter the world.
I figured the first five years of life included inside, don't you think? Okay, so onward. I'm going to quickly say this.
Everybody is born with about 100 billion neurons. These are little chemical electrical wires. Thinking is actually a chemical electrical experience through millions of neurons. And so you get this big wrinkled thing that's about two to three pounds, and it's pinkish if it's alive. If you look at a brain and it's gray or black, call somebody, it's dead.
And what happens is, ultimately, these areas of the brain will go together to do these things. That says math, that says computer, that says art. But these, you must understand as early childhood teachers, these are artificial neurologic tasks.
There's no part of the brain called art. There's no part of the brain called science. They're artificial neurologic tasks.
There's no part of the brain called reading. There's no part of the brain called writing. The brain was never designed to do these things.
And so early on in the first five years of life, you need to spend your time muscularizing and using the natural areas. That's the foundation. Then if you use the natural areas, then after the first five years of life, they start to combine to do the artificial tasks like spelling. Let me give you an example. Spelling.
You say to little Joanne when she's six, spell Joanne. And I look at my brain and there's no part called spelling. Do you want to see? Here, I'll give you the parts. There's the parts.
And if you could see the titles of these, none of it's called spelling. So what happens is when you ask little Joanne to spell when she's six, I go, hmm, no spelling part. Okay. I'll start with the visual part. I put some of those neurons working and say, I've seen that word.
It has a skinny part and a tall part. Visual configuration. Language.
I know it's a word. Auditory. That little curly Q at the beginning has a k sound.
Auditory discriminating, auditory sequencing. K, t spells cat. And do you see what I do?
I make all these natural parts. I'm on video. I make all these natural parts work together and I can do the artificial task of spelling. But if early on in the first five years I didn't make the visual, auditory, and language part parts big enough by doing natural tasks, when they combine later to do the artificial one, any one of those that didn't get used enough will interfere with the artificial task of spelling.
Example, dyslexia. We know what dyslexia is. We know how to deal with it. The window is between age 4 and 10. If you don't deal with dyslexia by age 10, the research shows good luck.
You're going to get hardly any change for a lot of work. The three major areas, or to use my terms rubber bands, that combine to do reading, visual, phonemic awareness, and language. If I haven't done a lot of visual things or have a learning disability there, I won't be able to tell a difference between a B and a D. That's a particular kind of dyslexia. If I can't hear the difference in short vowel sounds, that's in the phonemic awareness.
That will lead to a different kind of dyslexia. If I don't understand language and all the things that Lydia talked about before, it will interfere with my reading. So you see I have to do all of those things early, those natural areas.
So I use the metaphor of rubber bands. You don't get to decide how many neurons go in each of the natural areas when you're born. And it's decided in utero. So when the brain comes out, it has different sizes in different areas. And the bigger it is, That's a bigger rubber band.
And the smaller it is, that's a small rubber band. And you have, during windows, if you hit the small ones, you will make them more facile than if you wait. Everybody asks, how do I get the constellation? I hold this up to be what a brain actually looks like.
It's a whole combination of different rubber bands. Everybody in the brain field will tell you the first thing is the gene pool. So we want you to ask about it if you can and if there's knowledge about it because if you suspect some issues many learning issues are highly genetic dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, panic disorders, a whole variety are. The reason we want you to ask we want you to intervene for instance in potential dyslexia by age four. Well if you know your developmental stuff a lot of kids look dyslexic at four.
because they really have trouble reading. But if you get that, what Lydia talked about, that mm reaction, you look at a child and go, mm, not rhyming, something's not right, and you think it might be that, if you ask about parents or grandparents and there were reading issues, then even though it's too early to diagnose because of development, move ahead to do those things we know work with dyslexia. Don't call it that, but do that. That's why we want to know this. The other part, that's me and my husband.
The other part that gives you your rubber bands is sex, and if we had all day, I'd talk to you about that. But estrogen and testosterone in utero actually tags neurons. Like I said, language centers for girls, both sides.
Language centers for boys, left side. So we start to see that your collection of rubber bands has a good deal to do with your gene pool, but my genetic brother... didn't get my great grandmother stuff even though i did so you don't get to choose your sex and then a whole bunch of other stuff just being studied preemies we know will have some developmental issues which ones and in which areas has to do with how premature what your mother ate during pregnancy toxins in the environment we're seeing a significant increase in brain difference and brain learning issues and so we know something is going on here.
Have you noticed the really nice jacket that I wore for you? I'm glad you have because I'm 64 and it's coming off. Yes, yes.
The question is, oh. And someday a female is going to design the system. Now I'm going to put it in the middle, which moves periodically. I'll try not to move too much. First of all, doctors, the reason they want infants to stay in utero as long as possible into full term is that the icing on the neurologic cake is happening in the third trimester.
And so... You want to carry as close to full term as possible. If you don't, then you try, the latest research is showing, you try to imitate in utero to the infant. That's why you use incubators, and one of the newest things that you'll read about and you have, I'm sure, is what we call kangaroo care.
Skin to skin for at least a half an hour a day, heart to heart. That imitates the rhythm. and the warmth and everything, and it actually promotes the same kind of growth that happens in utero.
So kangaroo care is one of the primary things. They'll even take babies out of incubators for kangaroo care kind of thing. So that's the best that we know to try to imitate it. And that connection with another human being that is alive and warm and skin to skin is showing huge benefits and changes and growth patterns.
Still being studied, but that's some of it. So I'm going to give you 10 years of brain research quickly because I want to get to the windows. This is what I say to kids, and it's in that book out there. You didn't get to choose your rubber bands. If learning to read is hard for you, you didn't get to choose.
For Joanne Deak, it was a piece of cake. I didn't get to choose that either. Playing an instrument was really fatiguing and frustrating for me. My cousin would spend all of his time doing it at the same point.
So you don't get to choose your rubber bands. And new research. I always show Einstein's brain because his brain was so disparate.
The parts that went together to do math and science were huge. The parts that went together to do reading and spelling were small. He was seriously dyslexic. No brain that's been studied has the same size everywhere. And size has to do with aptitude.
The bigger the natural part is when you come out, that's what aptitude is, and you don't get to choose it. And the emotional part of the brain that is very powerful, when you ask a person to do something they have a lot of neurons in, or what I call a big rubber band, the emotional part feels a positive emotion, excitement, satisfaction, and the brain wants to do that. My way of saying it is young children will go towards the big rubber band.
They will do what they're already neurologically rich in. And the obverse is true. The part of the brain that deals with emotion, when you ask a young child to do something that they're not good at, that is hard for them, that they got a small rubber band in, the emotional part of the brain tends to feel a negative emotion.
Anger, frustration, depression, anxiety, fear. Isn't this fun? And the brain is plastic till the minute you get Alzheimer's or dementia or die.
But as you move away from the windows it starts to fossilize and loses some of its elasticity. Some of you are really tired, some of you are falling asleep. Do you know why I know this?
I've been asked to do relaxation tapes with my voice. I can take tired teachers and put anybody to sleep in eight minutes. It's really a thing of beauty to watch. A brain break, if we had time I'd make everybody stand up and do toe push-ups, butt wiggles, and hands above your head. That makes the blood rush up to your brain.
We don't have time, so wiggle your feet and your butt and think of some excuse to raise your hands above your head, okay? The brain is the greediest organ of the body. It always needs at least 20% of the blood supply up here to work. When you sit for 20 minutes or more, too much of the blood goes to your butt and feet, which is why you should never have kids sit still for more than 20 minutes and expect the same power to happen in their brain.
And I'm losing some of you. So I should either talk louder or get you to move, for God's sake. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. I'm going to try to bring this up to answer your question. Hold it for five frames and the answer will come up and then we'll talk more, okay? Because there's a yes but, and I don't know if you've noticed but I have a big but, okay? And we're going to get to the but because we never want to...
cold water or diminish passion or interest. It leads to joy, satisfaction, and happiness in life. And I did not say avoid your big rubber bands. What I said was you have a limited period of time to get the most bang out of the buck for the small ones. And all natural areas of the brain get used every day.
So you can't afford to only let the big ones stay big. So we're going to talk about that. But first, for neurons, they grow the ends, which gives them the growth. For them to grow first, to learn and to get bigger, they have to be ready.
In the literature, ready is called robust. And it's affected by age, not intelligence. Example. You get a hundred billion neurons, but they're not all ready to work.
You shouldn't teach algebra to a one-day-old, even though the neurons for algebra are in there. You shouldn't toilet train a two-year-old, I mean a two-day-old, even though the neurons for controlling the sphincter muscle are in there. You have to wait till neurons, neurons come in short, skinny, and naked. And when a sector, the neurons reach their full length, their full diameter, and get covered with a myelin sheath, they're called robust. and ready to work.
Example, the part of the brain right here, I always use that deals with toilet training, the deliberate use of the sphincter muscle for toilet training. Those neurons are in there at birth, but they're not robust in boys until between the ages of two and four. In girls, between the ages of one and three.
So you can try to toilet train somebody till you're blue in the face until those neurons are robust and it ain't going to work. The fun part is even when they become robust, the emotional part has to be willing to go along with it. So it's a combination of readiness and willingness, isn't it?
But don't try even if it's willing if the readiness isn't there. So what really is readiness? I'll let you read this on your own when you go home. Your neurons become ready at different ages up to about and there's discriminate there's there's discourse in the field but the brain doesn't hit its natural full growth until about age 30 at the minimum for males later. So what happens is the first decade is huge in terms of this and what happens is when these neurons that's what they look like these are the ends when they reach their full diameter and their full length, then what happens is, here's a picture, you have these cells called glial cells.
And suppose the neurons that deal with my sphincter muscle are now their full size. It sends a message over to the glial cell, and the glial says, make myelin, the fatty, waxy substance that covers a neuron. And it makes myelin, and it spits it out. See how it spits it out?
And when the myelin is on, Then when those neurons are used, it's like skating on ice and it goes really well. Without that on, it's like walking through molasses. So readiness isn't psychological. Readiness is neurological.
And in the first 20 years of life, you have various parts of the brain that are still not online yet. And when they come online newly is when the window opens. But you've got to wait for the readiness.
I don't have to preach to you about readiness. You preach it all the time. But that's what we now know it is.
And the first thing I will say to you quickly is, while the brain is growing naturally, don't mess with what we call the big three. The brain is the greediest organ of the body and it needs these big three to grow. I'm 64. I don't mess with the big three either, but especially during the growing years.
What are the big three? Sleep, nutrition, water. The brain actually grows at night.
It's busy during the day. And if there's sleep deprivation, it will impact IQ for the rest of your life. Did you hear me? During the growing years. And we are absolutely petrified in the field that children and adolescents are at huge sleep deprivation.
And you are too. But I worry less about you because your brain has already reached its full size. You can grow parts now, but it's reached its natural full size. But everybody in the field will tell you, if you could do one thing for a child, make sure the child sleeps enough. How much is enough?
The average is nine hours to accomplish all the growth that needs to happen. If you have a child who's ADD or ADHD, all bets are off. Nutrition, these are the big five. I said to my... People that I love growing up, you will eat these five things every day and swallow them and keep them down.
Because if you don't, your brain won't grow to its natural full size. And drinking water every hour, okay? I don't know if you can hear but see I made the comment that ADHD sleep patterns are different.
We don't know all of the all of that but it may be that the ADD ADHD human being needs less sleep but you still work with a specialist to get as much as you can. Look some people are born with Ferrari engines and some are born with Volkswagen engines you know. A Ferrari engine burns hot and fast and when it passes out it passes out deeply and then it comes back online. So maybe a Ferrari engine only needs six hours of deep sleep. I need nine.
I'm a Volkswagen engine. So we don't know all that yet but in general we want children to sleep as long as they possibly can. What are the windows?
I'm going to talk about windows in the thinking area, the feeling area, and the judgment area, if I can get as many as possible in here. This is one of the main things I want you to understand. In the first five years of life, The key natural areas are the sensorium because everything, anything you think about, anything you do, stuff has to get into the brain first. So in the first five years of life the sensorium are most important to use.
For example, if you don't play with a lot of things on the floor and three-dimensional things, the artificial task of writing will later be a problem. We're having to hire occupational therapists for kids at age five. because they're not growing the part of their brain that deals with wrist and palm muscles, which is related to writing.
So these areas are critical that you log in a lot of time on task. The problem is, to use my rubber band thing, they all come in, some are bigger than others because of learning style, but in general, all of these need to be absolutely stretched a lot during the first five years. The problem is this. We were talking about it at lunch. By age two and three, kids are spending 50 to 80 percent of their waking hours with visual input.
We are actually causing learning disabilities in these areas. Auditory attention, auditory processing, language acquisition, motoric, handwriting. Do you hear what I'm saying to you? I say to boys, look you'll be pulled. If you're an 80% boy, you'll be pulled to playing with Game Boys a lot.
You'll like it. And you'll want to spend four or five hours a day during peak time to stretch these others. And then when a teacher starts to talk to you like this and not show you pretty pictures that move quickly, your brain has shriveled in that area, and you will look like you had a learning disability. Do you hear what I'm saying?
You can't afford during the first five years of life to let a brain spend a lopsided amount of time on things. I want you to watch this video of Patricia Call. It's on TED.com. I don't have time to show it to you, but she is showing research that shows...
I'm actually not going to show the video because it's too late, but it's a 22-minute video and she is showing, for instance, New brain imaging is only being done one place in the world, it's called MEG, and we can image brains when they're infants. And part of what her research has shown over the last 12 months, get this, all impact in the language centers of the brain in the first year of life has to be done in person. Videos and audios even of the parents. have zero impact on the language acquisition centers of a child's brain. Isn't that something?
And even though the window is birth to three, this research is showing within the window there's an uber period of such extreme sensitivity that if you hear language only for a half an hour a day during this two-month period, it has the same effect as hearing it prolifically a lot. whether it's foreign or your native language. So if I want to have a child who is easily able to learn a tonal language later in life, if my child hears a tonal language in these two months for half an hour a day only, it'll set them up for a lifetime.
We don't even know what to call that period. The big period is called the window. There's not even a name for it yet, so I'm calling it the sweet spot or uber sensitivity, eight to ten months of life.
And you'll see it on this video. Please watch it. It's on TED.com.
The other area I wanted to talk to you before you go, periods of emotional sensitivity. The emotional part of the brain called the amygdala is fully robust at week age, at nine weeks of age. Did you hear me?
You can feel as much fear when you're nine weeks old as you can when you're 64. And so what we call crucible moments or crucible events emotionally, early on can have a lifetime impact. A crucible event is a big time thing. It can be positive or negative.
If it's negative, do something near that time to make it as better as it can be. If there's a death of a loved one, make sure that they're in a loving environment with other people. If there's divorce of parents, make sure it's as...
amiable as it can be. Try to take the negative out because early crucible negative events. have huge impact. What we're really worried about, and if we had more time we'd talk about, is crucible moments.
This is just a tick in time that can have long lasting impact. An offhand comment from a teacher, I've had four year olds talk to me when they're 20 about what a teacher said to them. We don't know why, but a real emotional hit, even if it was just a temporary thing, not a big event, just a moment.
has huge long-lasting effects. We are almost out of time. I want you to watch this video.
It's by Rebecca Sacks. I'm not going to show it to you because it's too long, but this is brand new information. Sympathy and empathy, we've now identified a key part of the brain to develop it.
In this generation of kids we're seeing less sympathy and empathy development than any generation we've seen. And when we brain image, we don't see much growth. It's called the RTPJ, R-T-B-J, right temporal parietal junction. The window is age 3 to 15. If you do a lot of things that get you to understand others and feel during that time, like I smack you, I watch you cry, and it bothers me, the RTPJ actually grows. But what we call distancing...
causing a lack of growth. I don't stay there and watch you. If you say something mean to me, I don't stay there and deal with you. I go and I write something online about it or I instant message or I text. I have parents instant messaging and texting their children within the same house.
The distancing, the not communicating, the not seeing and feeling. Thanksgiving is coming up. Kids come home and say I need a can of beans to put in the box for the hungry. Zero growth in the RTPJ. That's what we call distance learning.
The whole effect of technology is showing dramatic decrease not only in language and auditory skills but in sympathy and empathy and these things during windows have to be really limits have to be set and you have some of that. So to go back to your question, and if you would bring the house lights up, this is what I want you to think about. How do I, as a neurosculptor, as a teacher, as a parent, as a person dealing with human beings, how do I let you use your big rubber bands enough to have passion and joy? And how do I make sure, during the first five to ten years of life, you use the ones even that you don't want to use to outfit yourself to do all the artificial stuff later? Please hear me.
Do not push what we call academics or artificial learning too early. The foundation is make them do the things that grow the natural areas for five full years. the Scandinavian countries don't begin phonics and phonemic awareness until age eight.
We begin at age three and four. By age ten they leave us in the dust in reading achievement. They hit the natural areas first.
Questions? I will give you the rest of this to show you more in terms of other things. It's self-explanatory as you go on.
Yes, yes, absolutely. I work with girls all the time. And here, I did this study to show you...
Why we worry about girls who don't keep trying. I gave iPads to adolescents who had never gotten iPads. 80% of the boys did this.
Oh, nuts. Oh, pfft. Oh, ha ha. 80% of the girls did this.
Oh, tech guy. If we had time I'd talk about gender differences are not good or bad, they are is's. They have a positive and a negative side. What's the positive side?
I'll say it instead of having audience participation because we're out of time. The positive side of a boy doing that, his brain grows. He learns more. He gets used to problem solving, likes it, keeps doing it.
Doesn't get bothered by making a mess of things much. What's the negative side? If you're riding in a car with him, you're going to be there for hours.
Sometimes it will actually delay learning. Sometimes it will delay interaction with other people and learning with and for other people. Do you see?
It has a positive side, but there's always a negative underbelly. What's the positive side for the girl baby? She gets it done. She moves on to learn something else.
She keeps going. She forms relationships, interactions, good with working with others. Look at the positive side.
Look at the negative side. She doesn't like it when she can't get the answer right away. She doesn't want to take risks. She becomes a victim. She needs to have other people.
Do you hear it? So part of what we talk about with the brain is anything that's an is has a positive and a negative side. Our job, keep the positive side, diminish the negative side. You have small rubber bands, they'll bite you every day of your life.
Hit them during the window to make them somewhat facile. You have big rubber bands, thank your lucky stars, because that's going to bring you passion and joy. But you have to not let your brain spend so much time on those at the cost of the others, when the brain is very, very plastic.
That's the main message to you. And it's a hard message for kids. And, you know, part of the reason we're writing books like this is to have kids go, look, I had a little boy who was terrible at spelling and he would try to avoid spelling and I said to him Joey Joey when you learn how to sound out words you also will learn how to talk better and read better and you know that little girl that you like in your class you'll be able to talk to her better and you know when you try to figure out letters on a page it will also help you when she writes her phone number down to be able to call her and he goes you mean by doing spelling I'll get her to like me more I said, yeah, that's kind of it, yeah.
And he goes, oh, okay. And then when he went in, and this was an old-fashioned school, and his teacher said, take out your spelling books, and she poked me and goes, watch Joey. He's going to try to get out of class and go get a drink or pee, you know.
And she said, kids, take out your spelling books. And Joey whipped out his spelling book and started writing his spelling words over and over. And she looked at him and she goes, Joey, what are you doing?
He goes, do you know how small my rubber bands must be? I've got to work. Please hear me. It doesn't hurt self-esteem to do things that are hard.
It's how it's pitched and it's critically important these kids need to know that they can change their brains. So neurosculptors, when I become in charge of early childhood, starting salary for all early childhood neurosculptors because most of the windows are in your time period, starting salary $500,000 a year. Thank you.