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POPSAttention and Emotional Self Regulation 1) Alerting: helps us maintain an Alert State. 2) Orienting: focuses our senses on the information we want. For example, you are now listening to my voice. 3) Executive Attention: regulates a variety of networks, such as emotional responses and sensory information. This is critical for most other skills, and clearly correlated with academic performance. It is distributed in frontal lobes and the cingulate gyrus. The development of executive attention can be easily observed both by questionnaire and cognitive tasks after about age 3–4, when parents can identify the ability of their children to regulate their emotions and control their behavior in accord with social demands. Very interesting read.
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POPSGamers Make Better Surgeons Yet another study, by Fordham University, measured the effect of learning a new video game on problem-solving skills in middle school aged children. It found that "playing video games can improve cognitive and perceptual skills." "Certain types of video games can have beneficial effects improving gamers' dexterity as well as their ability to problem solve - attributes that have proven useful not only to students but to surgeons," the researchers found. There are actually "games" where you perform virtual operations, BTW.
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POPSParents affect brain development Love and affection are critical not only for emotional development - but also cognitive. Importantly, language stimulation (talking, reading, etc.) directly impacts language development, and consequentially, cognitive development.
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POPS Scientists: Humans and machines will merge in future The end result would be a new form of "posthuman" life with beings that possess qualities and skills so exceedingly advanced they no longer can be classified simply as humans. Bostrom declined to predict an exact time frame when this revolutionary biotechnological metamorphosis might occur. "Maybe it will take eight years or 200 years," he said. "It is very hard to predict."
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POPSChimps Agree: A Bird in Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush This tendency held true for both groups, despite different rearing histories, suggesting that their disinclination to barter is innate, says Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University, the lead researcher in this study. The chimps’ risk-averse behavior, Brosnan speculates, is attributable to a lack of language skills. “If one chimp could say to another, ‘OK, you crack nuts while I hunt meat, and then we’ll trade,’ they’d be able to specialize and have a developed economy,” Brosnan says.
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POPSIntergenerational School: Empowers Elderly to Stay Active
K-6th school in Cleveland welcomes volunteers in their 80s & 90s, some with Alzheimer's or dementia. The founders believe volunteering gives the elderly a sense of purpose and happiness, as well as many health benefits. TIS fosters an educational community of excellence that provides experiences and skills for life-long learning and spirited citizenship for learners of all ages. TIS encourages communities to create new environments that empower learners of all ages, as they become life-long contributors to a society. TIS incorporates community volunteers into the life of the school. Volunteers perform a variety of tasks from painting and setting up classrooms to mentoring young readers and writers. TIS is a free public school. Founder of TIF, Peter Whitehouse, believes when some people are diagnosed with Alzheimer's, they feel shame and withdraw themselves from society, so engagement is necessary for older people who have aging-associated cognitive challenges.
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POPSCognitive Fun -- Improve Fluid Intelligence Some examples of a computer based brain-training method designed to improve working memory, which as has been reported recently by a Swiss-American team, also increases scores in "fluid intelligence", or general problem-solving ability.
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POPSiCub A Robot with Artificial Intelligence Robots developed on the iCub platform have technologies for – grasping, locomotion, interaction, and even language-action association – these are of great relevance to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics.
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POPSDo animals think like autistic savants ? I'm sure the animals were thinking like this a long time before people turned up. So far the theory doesn't seem like it will be easy to verify one way or another, but who knows ? We are always discovering things we never expected to know.
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POPSReturn to old-fashioned play I have had many conversations about how children playing has changed..even from when I was a kid. But it could have been economics as well...we made up all sorts of games like fort or things where we just had to make rules up and improvise the "weapons" or what have you with little or no supervision. here is an interesting story on NPR about "old-fashioned" child's play and how it builds life skills.
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POPSCommon U.S. Myths About Bilingualism
Myth: Bilingual education has been proven ineffective, delaying the learning of English and slowing students down. Reality: The most comprehensive study is Thomas and Collier's '95 study of 42,000 language minority student records, with 8-12 years of data per student. Research found that "two-way bilingual education at the elementary school level is the most promising program model for the long-term academic success. Students in this program maintain grade level skills in their first language at least through 6th grade and reach the 50th percentile or NCE in their second language after 4-5 years of schooling in both languages. They also generally sustain the gains they made when they reach secondary education, unlike students in programs that provide little or no academic support in the first language." In addition to academic success,they also were able to understand, speak, read, and write in two languages. Unfortunately, this type of program is very scarce in the U.S.
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POPSPermaCulture :) I did this course in California in 2003. It was amazing really, even though I would differ in opinion on some of the participants political views, I LOVED the learning around permaculture...good stuff:)
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POPSParents urged to chill out So when I was being lazy or too busy, my kids weren't really missing out. Method in my madness - just the kids weren't too happy about it. Many of our friends were teachers and very busy with their kids, so our two thought they should be busy too. Beware the children of teachers.
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