The Reading Room

With all the studies milling around showing how early readers succeed more easily at school and possibly later in life, it's hard not to get despondent if your child is not quite there yet. Maybe it's by a little. Or maybe it's by a lot. Either or, does this mean your child will endlessly play catch-up on an ever-widening peer education gap?

The good news: You can 're-wire' the brain to get back up to speed.
The catch: It does require some work and dedication (as always).

In my last article, I discussed how being 'smart' was more a function of the amount of connections - or synapses - you had in your brain, vs. any underlying genetic advantage. And how these connections multiplied the more you learnt. That is, the more you 'push' and connect your brain, the 'smarter' you become, which is quite exciting stuff.  Not only is our brain ever-evolving, but we actually have a large degree of control over our full potential.  Yes, ol' dawgs can be taught new tricks!

Rewiring the Brain

Recent evidence to this in the reading vein, is a recent study from Carnegie Mellon University that showed intensive instruction for young kids to improve their reading skills physically caused their brains to 're-wire', growing new white matter.  White matter is essentially the 'connections' referred to in the previous paragraph, the cabling that wires the different parts of the brain together. 

The study looked at 72 children, aged between 8 and 10 years.  Of the group, 47 were poor readers, while the rest read at a normal level.  Both the good readers and 12 of the poor readers were excluded from the 100 hour remedial reading program. 
The aim was to track physical changes (if any) in the brain when a child transitions from a weak to strong reader. How they did this was to take before and after 'snapshots' of the brain, using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

DTI is brain imaging technique which tracks water movement in the brain, revealing microscopic structure of white matter.  Consistent water diffusion in white matter indicates good quality or efficient signal transmission in the brain, whereas inconsistent water diffusion indicates the opposite. Previous DTI studies had shown that kids and adults who were poor readers had areas of compromised (weaker) white matter.

What scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just found was a significant increase in the white matter quality of the children that underwent the remedial training. No such changes were found in the control groups of the good and 12 poor readers, indicating that improvement was directly due to the intensive reading program.
Interestingly, the amount of change in (water) diffusion amongst the treated kids was directly related to the amount of increase in phonological decoding ability, which is the translation of letters or spelling patterns of a word into speech patterns to identify and understand the word's meaning. I say interestingly, because phonological decoding often lies at the heart of many other reading disorders.

Going Beyond Reading

Now this is encouraging news for any parent or caregiver who has a child that battles with reading. Give them the right training and they will catch-up to their peers. But what is even more encouraging is the wider implications for the treatment of other reading disabilities, such as dyslexia, and developmental disorders, including autism.  

According to Dr Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, many mental or developmental disorders increasingly appear to be the result of circuitry problems in specific parts of the brain. If you can fix some of these circuitry or connection issues, you will most likely be able to improve or possibly cure the disorder at hand. And this study indicates that targeted behavioral treatment can do just that.
Makes you view educational interventions in whole new light, doesn't it?