Stable home a key to success
April 30th 2011 10:32
Your brain needs guard dogs.
Actually, John Medina said, it's your brain's hippocampus that needs guarding because, when stress overwhelms you, stress hormones can dive into that long-named part of the brain and damage it.
Not a good thing, especially for children in school. The hippocampus helps to turn short-term memory into long-term memory, he said.
That's why Medina -- who studies how the brain works -- told a packed room of luncheon-goers Thursday at the Century Center that the stressed child doesn't learn as well.
But how do you pinpoint what kind of stress is harmful?
"It all has to do with your perception of control over an adverse situation," Medina said at the annual luncheon of the Public Education Foundation, which raises money to support classroom programs in the South Bend Community School Corp.
If you perceive that you've lost control over your situation, he said, stress will hurt your learning.
"This is the 8-year-old boy who has to go home every night to a dad who is drunk and beats him," he said. "He (the boy) has nowhere else to go. That is stress."
In other words, a child's learning suffers in an emotionally unstable home.
Medina is a developmental molecular biologist at the University of Washington, and he runs the brain center at the Seattle Pacific University. He's written the books "Brain Rules" and "Brain Rules for Baby" about how brain science influences learning.
Medina used stories and humor to unleash the brain science, speaking with the quick pace, big volume and enthusiasm of an opera singer.
Early on, he spoke of those "guard dogs." They are a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. They can stop the nasty stress hormones from invading your hippocampus. You can boost the amount of BDNF -- one way is through aerobic exercise, he said. But he said there also are times when there's so much stress that "your defenses become overwhelmed."
Studies, he said, have shown that the over-stressed brain does much poorer in things like memory, problem solving and matching patterns.
Medina spoke of a colleague at the University of Washington, John Gottman, who developed "The Love Lab," an 11-hour lab where Gottman observed couples and took readings from EKG's and urine samples to track their stress levels as the couple tried to accomplish a goal together.
Gottman was able to predict which of the couples would divorce in the next three years -- with 96.4 percent accuracy, Medina said.
Gottman looked for just one variable that could predict that. He found it: "If the woman feels like she is being heard by the man, the marriage makes it," Medina said.
That, he said, goes back to the woman's sense of control over her challenges.
After nine months of the right intervention, Gottman found that none of the couples divorced. Scientists further found that, as marital hostilities lowered and satisfaction lifted, their children showed less stress, including less crying.
What if, Medina posed, first grade started when the child is born? Only the classes would be for the parents or caregivers. And the curriculum would be: how "to be adults in front of children."
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