These thirteen principles strongly support parental/caregiver interaction around marks of meaning. These principles are the distillation of 500 pages of comprehensive papers which I wrote when I began my doctorate in the late 1980's. The head of my dissertation committee told me to compress those 500 pages across seven categories of research into exactly 32 pages. I took that command as a constructive challenge, composing the following thirteen tenets of healthy brain-building:
1: The brain builds itself.
The brain builds neural assemblies. Some of the neural assemblies, like the ones for vision, are time-sensitive and become hard-wired. Some remain modifiable over a lifetime, like those for learning. The brain’s neural assemblies are blueprinted by genetics and realized by experience. The brain’s capacity for self-construction, integration and self-correction distinguishes these neural assemblies. Individual learning styles bring the brain’s self-regulatory abilities into high relief. For individual learning styles to emerge, the learning environment must be flexible and rich, providing a range of sensory experiences, including visual, tactile and verbal exploration.
2: Each brain is different.
Each brain self-constructs, using inherited blueprints and experience. Although the blueprints for the wiring plan may be more or less alike in human brains, the wiring pattern of each brain is unique for several reasons: uniqueness results from the indeterminability of the exact path any neuron will take as it burrows through brain tissue; uniqueness is also the result of individual human experiences, especially with people and language.
Each brain has more neurons than the Milky Way has stars - hundreds of billions. As each neuron noses its way through brain tissue, “sniffing out” its proper site, a random function associated with the growth-cone insures the fact that no
two brains are wired exactly the same, even in identical twins. This characteristic of the central nervous system is called “irreproducability.”101,102 The sheer number of neurons, along with the random function, creates individuality at the neural level. Experience, including educational experience, creates individuality on a mental/emotional level thereafter. Each individual brain not only functions differently from every other brain, but, at any moment, that brain can change its own approaches to thinking, dramatically changing its own metabolic profile as well as its neural nets and their level of connectivity. The extraordinary point emphasized by this book is the degree to which the variability of the brain remains in the control of the learner for a lifetime.
3: There are critical periods for brain growth.
Just before birth, the brain makes more neurons than it needs. Soon after birth, the brain makes more connections than it needs. A continual rhythmic firing literally constructs the brain. Exuberant synaptogenesis subsides; connections are pruned in response to experience and learning. The brain’s wiring systems for vision, language, attention, emotion, and motor skills stabilize. Many of the most significant connections are forged for life by the age of three.
Still, the brain’s wiring remains modifiable for learning; but there is a catch: the feedback loop. The quality of the learning determines the quality of the wiring; the non-modifiable wiring systems determine the brain’s future capabilities. If a baby is born with cataracts and they are not removed, the baby’s ability to see as an adult will be limited. Because visual networks stabilize when children are young and because visual learning remains so important, the quality of children’s visual stimulation at the pre-school and elementary levels of education is very important. Other early experiences persist, too, including attitudes about people and the world.
4: The brain grows in stages.
Some brain systems mature and stabilize before others can mature and stabilize. The timing between two interdependent systems is sometimes so close that several systems develop almost simultaneously. The exact timing or order of multiple maturations is indeterminable. No two brains grow in exactly the same way at the same time. Classroom expectations for developmental milestones must be flexible.
5: Exploratory problem-solving helps the brain to grow.
Physical exploration using all of the senses, particularly touch, encourages brain growth.
The more physically the brain approaches a problem, the more clearly formed and fully dimensional the solution to that problem will be. Exploratory problem-solving not only streamlines neural assemblies103,104,105, it also increases the production of myelin, the fast-axon insulator. A better wiring system for problem solving is pared-down, densely associative, and very fast.
6: Feelings of control help the brain to grow.
Feelings of well-being and brain growth correlate. A child who feels helpless and victimized may grow up with an underdeveloped limbic system. That adult may experience problems with controlling rage.
A sense of control encourages the growth of the limbic system which makes a broad range of controllable emotions possible. Caregiving strategies and educational strategies that play to children’s strengths - like drawing - increase feelings of success and control.
7: Experience effects the brain’s potential and keeps modifying the brain for learning.
Brains deprived of sufficient stimulation or abused by injury or trauma can be 20% to 30% smaller than average. The brain thrives on activity; it atrophies from disuse. An under-used or abused brain develops poorly and works poorly. For the human brain to grow, the body needs cuddling and play and the mind requires personal, direct, interesting conversation. Language experience is particularly important.
Experience modifies neural networks. Although many systems in the brain stabilize, becoming largely unmodifiable, neural changes in response to learning occur over a lifetime. It is possible to construct a better brain at any time. It is most effective to lay down patterns for effective thinking skills early in childhood, just as it is most effective to learn to ski, ride a bike or speak a foreign language when we are young.
As a self-correcting system, the brain can repair itself by using old areas in new ways, new areas in old ways, and new areas in new ways. Because of a phenomenon described as “neural drift,” a functional brain area is able to infiltrate and remediate a dysfunctional area. This information is especially relevant for remedial education. A strength helps a weakness. For instance, left hemisphere damage is compensated for by right hemispheric strengths. By inference, the “drawing part” of the brain should be able to substitute for the “writing part”. All students can take advantage of the brain’s repairability and flexibility by
determining their own special strengths through experimentation. To do so, the learning environment must be rich and flexible. Practice with multiple literacies provided cognitive richness. Then, students can use their strengths to their best advantage.
Severe early damage to the brain is irreparable, influencing the learner’s ability to feel and control emotions and to store memories over a lifetime. This damaged mental profile characterizes many violent, repeat offenders.
8: Bodily experience helps the brain to construct mental maps including language.
Spatial understanding helps direct actions of the eyes, hands and feet. The geometry of physically experienced space becomes a frame of reference for the brain’s sensorimotor maps. This spatial understanding precedes and undergirds multiple levels of linguistic understanding. Educators are apt to dichotomize non-linguistic and linguistic systems of representation - like art and language. Language systems are continuous with each other and depend upon each other for structure and information. The premise of this book is that effective writing skills depend upon effective drawing skills. Neural systems for representing meaning are scaffolded. This means that drawing, writing and mathematics are interconnected systems which can be taught integratively.
9: The brain is redundant.
Brains have more processing power than is necessary, making recovery from damage and compensation for damage possible. The fact that the brain is equipped with a margin for error insures its repairability, recoverability, and modifiability - in short, its resourcefulness.
10: Visual searches help the brain grow.
An innate predisposition for order is what I believe underlies Noam Chomsky's106 and Stephen Pinker's107 innate "language instinct". I describe this predisposition in my 1990 dissertation, and in Volume III of this series to come out in 2010. This predisposition for order is the true “deep grammar” which stimulates visual searches, on which the construction of verbal language rests. Visual searches organize the brain for language. Then, the "syntax of intelligent thought"1 takes over. This spatial grammatical system extends itself to the brain’s linguistic system. Exposure to language, then, triggers language.108 After that, specific cultural codes or grammars for mother tongues become influential.
Without any training in visual searches, infants conduct visual/physical searches. The flailing of arms and legs and the instinctual motions of the eyes quickly become purposeful and informative. New information organizes the brain in new ways. Visual searches and brain growth constitute a feedback loop.
As the brain’s visual system matures, the brain’s ability to make distinctions sharpens. The visual system becomes adept at determining the edges of things. Once the brain is able to determine where one thing stops and another begins, the brain can make comparisons. By comparing and contrasting information, the brain winnows out similarities and differences, providing the bases for decisions, opinions and conclusions.
The way the brain learns to conduct visual searches profoundly influences the brain’s mental and emotional growth. The visual system, the emotional or limbic system and the ability to form attachments are interconnected. The early visual ability to make distinctions between light and dark, between edges of objects and surrounding space, lays the cognitive foundation for more general abilities, like recognizing a person’s face as familiar or appealing, or, as the child matures, choosing between two compelling alternatives.
The act of drawing trains the brain’s visual system to search for and to identify and to recognize distinctions, to make comparisons and, ultimately, to make value judgments between alternatives in preparation for forming intelligent attachments. This training establishes a grammar of intelligent thought, or a procedure for order.
11: Storing memories in more than one way creates stronger, more accessible memories.
The same information can be stored and accessed in different ways. A child can create and access information about an object - like a bird’s wing - by drawing it, talking about it, writing about it, reading about it, dancing about it, remembering stories about it, making metaphors and similes, analogies, predictions and hypotheses about it. With this broad knowledge base in place, a child can access the bird’s wing by selecting the mental directory labeled “bird” or “wing” via a host of other associations.
12:Comparisons help the brain to organize and categorize, or recognize information.
Some of the templates for comparison are determined by the senses. Spoken and written languages use the same kinds of strategies used by spatial information systems, including vision. “Saccades”(sah-cahds) describes the infinitesimal, back-and-forth scanning motion of the eyes. This scanning movement “refreshes” an image by re-stimulating the visual cells in the retina. On a mental level, saccades may provide the neural basis for comparing and contrasting information.
One thing may be darker or lighter than another, more or less defined at the edges, larger or smaller, stiller or more in motion. At linguistic levels, one object may be more or less important than another or more or less interesting. The deliberate use of comparative strategies including simile, metaphor and analogy, contribute to the grammar of intelligent thought. Comparative strategies can become saccade-like if they are practiced until they become automatic, including translations across systems of representation, like Drawing/Writing.
13: Language is central to thought.
Dynamic systems exhibit orderly behavior. Apparent chaos or messiness is an aspect of highly organized systems and is an artifact of their complexity.
The brain is a dynamic system which executes numerous processes simultaneously. How the brain mobilizes organizational strategies determines the quality and usefulness of the information it stores. This book maintains that a systematic parts-to-whole, concrete to abstract, visual to verbal strategy for information processing is brain-like and teachable and describes this cumulative strategy as an orderly system, or “grammar of intelligent thought”. The five-step program outlined in Drawing/Writing and the New Literacy, 1997 and in HandMade Marks, 2009 and in Saving Literacy, 2009 demonstrates that this orderly mental system can be established through consistent training in an integrative cross-modal process called Scribbling/Drawing/Writing.
Footnotes:
101 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 1985. Neuronal Man. Oxford University Press:New York
102 Rosenfield, Israel. 1988. The Invention of Memory. Basic Books: New York.
103 Greenough, W T; Sirevaag A M. 1988. “A multivariate statistical summary of synaptic plasticity measures in rats exposed to complex social and individual environments.” Brain Research 1988;4441(1-2);386-92.
104 Greenough, WT. 1987. “What’s special about development? Thoughts on the bases of experience-sensitive synaptic plasticity.” Developmental Psychology. Academic Press: New York.
105 Sirevaag AM; Greenough WT. 1988. “Direct evidence that complex experience increases capillary branching and surface area in visual cortex in young rats.” Brain Research 1988; 471(2):299-304.
106 Chomsky, N. “Human language and other semiotic systems.” In: Sebok TA, Sebok J-U, editors. Speaking of apes: a critical anthology of two-way communication with man. New York: Plenum Press; 1980. p. 429-40.
107 Pinker, Steven, 1994 The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, New York: HarperPerennial.
1 Sheridan, S.R. 1990. "Drawing/Writing: a brain-based writing program designed to develop descriptive analytical and inferential thinking skills at the elementary school level." UMASS School of Education doctoral dissertation.
108 Sampson, Geoffrey. 1997. Educating Eve: The “Language Instinct” Debate. Cassell: London, New York.
