Reading stimulates white matter in kids--Get your kids reading
Posted By Abigail Klein Leichman On November 13, 2012 (12:00 am) In
Education,
Lifestyle
Complex
changes in brain connections as children learn how to read have been
newly revealed in a study initiated by Israeli brain science researcher,
Michal Ben-Shachar.
Published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,
the study focuses on “white matter” – a network of pale,
myelin-sheathed connections that allows information transfer between
distant parts of the brain.
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Ben-Shachar
and a team from Stanford University – where Ben-Shachar, a professor at
Bar Ilan University, conducted her post-doctoral research — used an
MRI-based non-invasive technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)
to track the development of reading skills and white matter connections
in 55 children ages seven to 12 over a three-year period, and how they
change over time.
“The nice thing about DTI is that it is really
child friendly,” said Ben-Shachar, who continues to collaborate with two
Stanford labs in researching the development of reading in children
born prematurely. “In a 12-minute scan you can collect high-quality data
from the whole brain, while the child is lying still watching a movie.”
Counterintuitive findings
The
National Institutes of Health-funded study was conducted between 2004
and 2007, and collected so much data that it took years to organize and
analyze it.
The results were somewhat surprising. Children who
became good readers initially had lower levels of white matter in the
areas of the brain associated with reading, but these levels grew
rapidly during the three-year test period.
However, children who
became below-average readers started out with more white matter in the
areas associated with reading, and these levels declined over time —
suggesting that these children were not creating and strengthening the
neural pathways key to reading ability.
- Bar-Ilan’s Michal Ben-Shachar.
“When we looked at the first year of collected data, in an article published last year in the
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,
it really struck us as so surprising to see a reverse correlation
between white matter and reading ability,” Ben-Shachar tells ISRAEL21c.
“This [new] paper helps us make sense of it, because we see the weaker
readers start with stronger connections that decline over time.”
She
speculates that this may be because during the first three years of
life, children grow many brain connections and then start “pruning” ones
they don’t use in order to strengthen the more relevant connections.
“Perhaps there is not enough pruning in the brains of kids who become
poor readers,” she suggests.
Sets the tone for future studies
Most
developmental imaging studies compare brain measurements in groups of
children and adults, while this one was unique in that it followed the
same group of children over a long period of time.
“By doing so,
we discovered that the changes in brain connections are more informative
about reading skill than the measurement at a specific point in time,”
says Ben-Shachar.
“This is really important if we are ever going
to use MRI as a diagnostic tool in education, in addition to standard
behavioral tools. It means we will have to assess the child more than
once in order to look at dynamic developmental changes, because change
is more important than absolute measures at a particular time point.”
At
her Bar-Ilan lab, Ben-Shachar is working with Ethiopian immigrants for
whom Hebrew is their first written language, in the hope of identifying
how the adult brain changes as literacy is acquired.
Along with
Ofer Amir and Ruth Ezrati from Tel Aviv University, Ben-Shachar recently
won a prestigious grant from the Israel Science Foundation to study
white matter pathways in the brains of adults who stutter.
Meanwhile, she goes to California each summer to participate in the ongoing child imaging studies at Stanford.
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