Hand-Eye Coordination Improves Cognitive and Social Skills

Researchers link hand-eye coordination to learning, cognition, and sociability.
Published on November 15, 2013
by Christopher Bergland in The Athlete's Way

Cognitive scientists at Indiana University have discovered a strong correlation between hand-eye coordination, learning abilities, and social communication skills. The study titled “Joint Attention Without Gaze Following: Human Infants and Their Parents Coordinate Visual Attention to Objects Through Eye-Hand Coordination," was published on November 13, 2013 in the online journal PLOS ONE.

The new research provides compelling evidence for a practical way that social partners—in this case, 1-year-olds and their parents—can coordinate their joint attention and focus, which is a key component of parent-child communication and early language learning.

Previous research involving visual attention between parents and toddlers has focused more on the ability of each person to follow the gaze of the other person’s eyes. In recent years, many studies have found a link between eye contact, gaze and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

The Indiana researchers realized that hand-eye coordination is much more common throughout the day, and that when the parent and toddler both focus their hands and eyes on an object they interact as equals, rather than one or the other taking the lead.

"Currently, interventions consist of training children to look at the other's face and gaze," said Chen Yu, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. "Now we know that typically developing children achieve joint attention with caregivers less through gaze following and more often through following the other's hands."

The researchers understand that, "The daily lives of toddlers are filled with social contexts in which objects are handled, such as mealtime, toy play and getting dressed. In those contexts, it appears we need to look more at another's hands to follow the other's lead, not just gaze."

The findings open up exciting questions about language learning and the teaching of language. They could also have major implications for the treatment of children with early social-communication impairment, such as autism, where joint caregiver-child attention with respect to objects and events is a key issue. The researchers believe these findings solve some of the problems and inadequacies of the classic unified “gaze-following” theory.

The researchers found that gaze-following theory tends to be imprecise in the real and chaotic world outside the sterility of a laboratory. It can be hard to tell precisely what someone is looking at when there are several objects together. It is easier and more precise to follow someone's hands. In other situations, it may be more useful to follow the other's gaze, according to the researchers. "Each of these pathways can be useful," Yu said. "A multi-pathway solution creates more options and gives us more robust solutions."

Researchers used innovative head-mounted eye-tracking technology that records the views of those wearing it, like Google Glass, which has never been used before with young children. While recording moment-to-moment data of what both parent and child visually attend to as they play together in the lab, the researchers also applied advanced data-mining techniques to discover fine-grained eye, head and hand movement patterns from a rich dataset they obtained from multimodal digital data.

"This really offers a new way to understand and teach joint attention skills," said co-author Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. Smith has done pioneering research and theoretical work in the development of human cognition, particularly as it relates to children ages 1 to 3 acquiring their first language. "We know that although young children can follow eye gaze, it is not precise, cueing attention only generally to the left or right. Hand actions are spatially precise, so hand-following might actually teach more precise gaze-following."

The Cerebellum Coordinates Eye and Hand Tracking Movements

I have written extensively in The Athlete’s Way about the possible role the cerebellum plays in cognitive function and well-being throughout a lifespan. This research from Indiana University offers more proof of the connection between the cerebellum and cerebral functions linked to learning and social behavior.
The mysterious and powerful cerebellum (Latin: Little Brain) is only 10% of brain volume but holds over 50% of your brain’s neurons. My father, who was a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist always said, “whatever the cerebellum is doing, it’s doing a lot of it.”

In another study from March 2013, a research team honed in on the gene Tsc2 in Purkinje cells of the cerebellum and found that loss of Tsc2 in Purkinje cells lead to autistic-like behavioral deficits. These studies provide compelling evidence that Purkinje cell loss in the cerebellum and/or dysfunction may be an important link between ASD as well as a "general anatomic phenomenon that contributes to the ASD phenotype," according to researchers.

A 2001 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience confirmed that the cerebellum coordinates eye and hand tracking movements. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during visually guided tracking tasks that required varying degrees of hand-eye coordination.

The researchers found that the cerebellum was more active during independent rather than coordinated eye and hand tracking. However, in three further tasks, they also found increases in cerebellar blood oxygenation as hand-eye coordination increased.

This proves that the cerebellum has a direct relationship to tracking performance, with high activity seen during both coordinated and independent conditions of hand and eye tracking. This data provides the most direct  evidence that the cerebellum not only supports motor coordination but plays a significant role in learning to coordinate eye and hand movement.

Could the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex be Linked to Autism?

The cerebellum also controls the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) which is a reflex eye movement that stabilizes images during head movement by producing an eye movement in the direction opposite to head movement, which keeps the image in the center of your visual field. VOR is used for tracking a target and for helping to coordinate hand-eye movement. For example, when the head moves to the right, the eyes move to the left, and vice versa. Since slight head movement is present all the time, the VOR is very important for stabilizing vision.

The vestibulo-ocular reflex needs to work very quickly to maintain clear vision and focus. Head movements must be compensated for almost immediately—otherwise, your vision would look like a video taken with a shaky hand or in motion. VOR is used to play most sports and is key for hitting a tennis ball, hockey puck, baseball, catching a football... and for striking any moving target.
My father—who was a nationally ranked tennis player in his youth—always said, "Of this I am absolutely positive, becoming a neurosurgeon was the direct consequence of my eye for the ball." When people say 'keep-your-eye-on-the-ball,' they are literally describing the importance of a finely tuned vestibulo-ocular reflex.

To achieve clear vision, signals from the inner ear are sent as directly as possible to the eye muscles: the connection involves only three neurons, and is correspondingly called the three neuron arc. Using these direct connections, eye movements lag the head movements by less than 10 milliseconds. A well functioning vestibulo-ocular reflex is one of the fastest reflexes in the human body.

My fascination with the cerebellum and VOR is something my father passed on to me. I've yet to find research that connects the VOR to brain connectivity, autism, or learning disabilities. To my knowledge, the role of VOR in autism spectrum disorder and other learning disabilities is still an educated guess.

Brain Connectivity Between Hemispheres is Key to Learning

Another study from August 2013 found that atypical visual orientation in 7-month-olds could be a sign of risk for autism. The study titled “White Matter Microstructure and Atypical Visual Orienting in 7-Month-Olds at Risk for Autism” was published in American Journal of Psychiatry. White matter in the corpus callosum connects the left and right hemispheres of your cerebrum.

The researchers from Philadelphia found that children who are later diagnosed with autism have subtle but measurable differences in attention as early as 7 months of age. Researchers found that infants who went on to be diagnosed with autism are slower to shift their gaze from one object to another (by approximately 50 milliseconds), compared to peers who did not receive the diagnosis.

The scientists identified specific brain circuits in the corpus callosum were responsible for causing the slower response. The findings point to a problem they called "sticky attention," which is a phenomenon observed in preschool and older children with autism, but not yet well studied before in babies at risk for autism.

They were slower than both high-risk-negative and low-risk infants to orient or shift their gaze to objects that appeared outside their direct gaze. Results also implicate a specific neural circuit (the splenium of the corpus callosum), which may develop differently in those at risk for ASD compared to typically developing infants, who show more rapid orienting to visual stimuli.

"This is a very exciting study, because the impairments in shifting gaze and attention that we found in 7-month-olds may be a fundamental problem in autism," said Robert T. Schultz, Ph.D. Director of the Center for Autism Research and a co-author on the study. "These results are another piece of the puzzle in pinpointing the earliest signs of autism. Understanding how autism begins and unfolds in the first years of life will pave the way for more effective interventions and better long-term outcomes for individuals with autism and their families."

Other research on the benefits of playing an instrument before age 7 and the importance of hand gesticulation early in life imply that the neural scaffolding that connects brain hemispheres needs to be laid down early for the neural connections to have an infrastructure to build upon.

Conclusion: Scaffolding for Brain Connectivity is Built in Toddlers via Hand-Eye Coordination

Research is mounting that creating strong connectivity between both hemispheres of the cerebrum and both hemispheres of the cerebellum holds the key for optimizing brain function throughout a lifespan.

This new research on the role of hand-eye coordination in the early development of toddlers is another clue for practical ways that we can give toddlers and children the best odds for learning, creating social connectivity and lay the neural groundwork for maximizing their potential.

Just like a baby chick who has a patch put over one eye throughout early development would not have the scaffolding to build the neural connections needed for vision in that eye ...  it makes sense that daily activities in early life are important for laying down an initial neural scaffolding between brain hemispheres that serves as an infrastructure to fortify well-connected brain hemispheres in childhood and beyond.

As I put the pieces of this puzzle together, my hypothesis (and advice) is that parents, teachers and caregivers should strive to include daily activities that strenghten brain connectivity between all four brain hemispheres—starting from the first day of a person’s life. These initial neural connections will play a crucial role in optimizing a child's human potential for a lifespan.

Article retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201311/hand-eye-coordination-improves-cognitive-and-social-skills

Images retrieved from: http://blog.talkingmatters.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Dion-six-threading.jpg

http://www.spotkidstherapy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Eye-hand-coordination.jpg

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https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW1i6JzBbf4D2UySEgKhpniiFfBr_3SxEJ6mldB9bE5sxgphA-SgtHURdBsxkjRUt4HJs1qS7ujZ8TV8ZYbN0UnN4CQ5HzXl0AJTvxVs2vvbl1-kCX7zfXSvgbDdlgljXw1WwkIWoHExX5/s1600/kidssewingkit8.jpg

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Junk Food May Limit Children's Intelligence and Learning Ability

There is a clear impact of nutrition on the potential development of Alzheimer's disease and other late-life cognitive disorders.  Green vegetables, berries, and other plant foods reduce risk, whereas animal products and processed foods increase risk.^1-4  However, the damaging effects of unhealthy foods on the brain occur throughout life.  Research now suggests that the typical American childhood diet including burgers, pasta, pizza, chicken nuggets, french fries, processed sweetened cold cereals, sweets and soda negatively affects school performance and learning. Overall math performance in the U.S. lags far behind many other developed nations⁵, and it is likely that the nutrient-poor American diet is a significant contributing factor.

We as parents are strongly committed to supporting our children’s academic achievement. We want the best for our children, and we take an active interest in their schooling; we do everything we can to make sure that they will be well educated and able to compete as working adults in our increasingly technological world. However, how many parents think about the impact of the foods they give their children on their academic performance?

Early childhood:

Parents must give their children’s brains the right raw materials with which to learn – and start early. Breast milk provides a DHA-rich foundation for a healthy brain, and when solid foods are added, their nutritional quality is of paramount importance for the brain’s continued development. Several studies have now found that dietary patterns in early childhood affect IQ scores years later. In one study, greater consumption of fruits and vegetables upon introducing solid foods was associated with higher IQ and better memory skills when at 4 years of age.6 Similarly in another study, children who regularly ate cookies, chocolate, other sweets, soda, and chips during the first two years of life showed decreased IQ at age 8 compared to children who did not eat these foods. Nutrition during this formative period has a meaningful long-term effect, providing building blocks to construct the growing brain.7 The brain is highly susceptible to oxidative stress, so a healthful, antioxidant-rich diet is especially beneficial for the brain and is likely involved in this link between natural plant foods and higher IQ scores.

Teenage years:

Young children who are fed processed, nutrient-poor foods are likely to become unhealthy teenagers, and eventually unhealthy adults. Now twenty-three percent of teens in the U.S. are prediabetic or diabetic, 22% have high or borderline high LDL cholesterol levels, and 14% have hypertension or prehypertension.8

A recent study tested cognitive abilities and performed brain MRIs on teens with and without metabolic syndrome, a combination of at least three diet-related metabolic abnormalities among a list including insulin resistance, high triglycerides and hypertension. The teens with metabolic syndrome had lower spelling and math scores, lower IQs, and reduced attention span. Their brain MRIs showed a smaller hippocampus, especially in those with insulin resistance – extremely important since the hippocampus is a part of the brain involved in learning new information.9  This means that our American obesity-promoting, diabetic promoting diet actually can cause parts of the brain to shrink.  The researchers concluded that insulin resistance and other components of the metabolic syndrome, as a result of a poor diet, may impair teenagers’ academic performance, and maybe even their learning abilities throughout their lifetime.

The time to feed your children healthfully is now. A diet rich in greens, berries, other fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds is the only way to ensure that children get the array of phytochemicals, antioxidants, fatty acids and other micronutrients to adequately supply their growing and constantly learning brains.  Junk food is not for kids.

References:

1. Otsuka M, Yamaguchi K, Ueki A. Similarities and differences between Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia from the viewpoint of nutrition. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2002;977:155-161.

2. Morris MC, Evans DA, Bienias JL, et al. Dietary fats and the risk of incident Alzheimer disease. Arch Neurol 2003;60:194-200.

3. Joseph JA, Shukitt-Hale B, Willis LM. Grape juice, berries, and walnuts affect brain aging and behavior. J Nutr 2009;139:1813S-1817S.

4. Devore EE, Kang JH, Breteler MM, et al. Dietary intakes of berries and flavonoids in relation to cognitive decline. Ann Neurol 2012.

5. University of Southern California: U.S. Education Spending and Performance vs. the World. [Infographic]. http://mat.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-infographic/. Accessed October 12, 2012.

6. Gale CR, Martyn CN, Marriott LD, et al. Dietary patterns in infancy and cognitive and neuropsychological function in childhood. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 2009;50:816-823.

7. Smithers LG, Golley RK, Mittinty MN, et al. Dietary patterns at 6, 15 and 24 months of age are associated with IQ at 8 years of age. Eur J Epidemiol 2012;27:525-535.

8. May AL, Kuklina EV, Yoon PW. Prevalence of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors Among US Adolescents, 1999-2008. Pediatrics 2012;129:1035.

9. Yau PL, Castro MG, Tagani A, et al. Obesity and metabolic syndrome and functional and structural brain impairments in adolescence. Pediatrics 2012;130:e856-864.

  

Moms have long known that what their kids eat can promote physical health, but their diet can also be the key to mental well-being. As back-to-school time approaches, incorporating these brain foods into daily meals is a delicious way to provide the nutrients necessary for learning, memory and other cognitive functions.  

•           A healthy breakfast including eggs gets kids off to a good start. This classic morning favorite is rich in choline, a substance that contributes to the creation of memory stem cells, and the high protein content helps kids to focus. Wrapping scrambled eggs in a burrito makes them fun to eat. As a bonus, it’s portable so they can eat it on the go.

•           Oatmeal’s high fiber content means that it digests slowly, providing a steady supply of glucose to maintain energy levels instead of the spike-and-crash that results from sugary foods. Kids who find it to be too bland will love this baked oatmeal layered with fruit. Blueberries add an extra boost of potassium and vitamin C, two more elements important for brain health.

•           Salmon contains high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, an essential component of brain development and heart health as well as a natural mood elevator. Moms who may be skeptical of getting their kids to eat fish will be surprised with the results when they disguise it as a “burger”. Using buns with zinc-laden sesame seeds doubles up on the brain food factor.

•           Turkey isn’t just for Thanksgiving. It contains tyrosine, which contributes to alertness, along with tryptophan, which is a natural mood regulator and promotes quality sleep. Adding turkey to a favorite dish like pizza makes it even more appealing. It’s also a way to sneak in some nutrient-rich leafy green vegetable such as spinach.

•           Brain food can also be used for snacks that kids will enjoy. Beans and other iron-rich foods help to improve focus and memory. This bean dip is simple to make and pairs well with crunchy tortilla chips. The choice of salsa makes it easy to adjust the heat to a kid-friendly level.

Doing well in school is job number one for kids. Moms who plan their menus to include these powerful brain foods help them perform at their peak.

Article Retrieved:

http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/children-junk-food-may-limit-childrens-intelligence-and-learning-ability.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiseaseProof+%28Disease+Proof%29

Picture retrieved from:http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=healthy+food&qs=n&form=QBIR&pq=healthy+food&sc=8-8&sp=-1&sk=&id=6C28CBB99C751EAD7CB5AA0C7BD2FCE45139D829&selectedIndex=15#view=detail&id=6C28CBB99C751EAD7CB5AA0C7BD2FCE45139D829&selectedIndex=0
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http://terriskitchenuk.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/fast-food.jpg

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Can a Lack of Sleep Set Back Your Child's Cognitive Abilities?

Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.

Snooze or Lose
By Po Bronson Published Oct 7, 2007

Morgan is a 10-year-old fifth-grader in Roxbury, New Jersey. She’s fair-skinned, petite, with freckles across her nose and wavy, light-brown hair. Her father is a police sergeant on duty until 3 a.m. Her mother, Heather, works part time, devoting herself to shuffling Morgan and her brother to their many activities. Morgan plays soccer, but her first love is competitive swimming, with year-round workouts that have broadened her shoulders. She’s also a violinist in the school orchestra, with practices and lessons each week. Every night, Morgan sits down to homework before watching Flip This House or another show with her mother. Morgan has always appeared to be an enthusiastic, well-balanced child.


But once Morgan spent a year in the classroom of a demanding teacher, she could no longer unwind at night. Despite a reasonable bedtime of 9:30 p.m., she would lay awake in frustration until 11:30, sometimes midnight, clutching her leopard-fur pillow. On her fairy-dust purple bedroom walls were taped index cards, each with a vocabulary word Morgan was having trouble with. Unable to sleep, she turned back to her studies, determined not to let her grades suffer. Instead, she saw herself fall apart emotionally. During the day, she was noticeably crabby and prone to crying easily. Occasionally, Morgan nearly fell asleep in class.

Concerned about her daughter’s well-being, Heather asked the family’s pediatrician about Morgan’s sleep. “He kind of blew me off and didn’t seem interested in it,” she recalls. “He said, ‘So she gets tired once in a while. She’ll outgrow it.’”

The pediatrician’s opinion is typical. According to surveys by the National Sleep Foundation, 90 percent of American parents think their child is getting enough sleep. The kids themselves say otherwise. In those same surveys, 60 percent of high schoolers report extreme daytime sleepiness. In another study, a quarter admit their grades have dropped because of it. Over 25 percent fall asleep in class at least once a week.

The raw numbers more than back them up. Half of all adolescents get less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights. By the time they are seniors in high school, according to studies by the University of Kentucky, they average only slightly more than 6.5 hours of sleep a night. Only 5 percent of high-school seniors average eight hours. Sure, we remember being tired when we went to school. But not like today’s kids.

It has been documented in a handful of major studies that children, from elementary school through high school, get about an hour less sleep each night than they did 30 years ago. While parents obsess over babies’ sleep, this concern falls off the priority list after preschool. Even kindergartners get 30 minutes less a night than they used to.

There are many causes for this lost hour of sleep. Overscheduling of activities, burdensome homework, lax bedtimes, televisions and cell phones in the bedroom all contribute. So does guilt; home from work after dark, parents want time with their children and are reluctant to play the hard-ass who orders them to bed. All these reasons converge on one simple twist of convenient ignorance: Until now, we could overlook the lost hour because we never really knew its true cost to children.

Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact of this single lost hour. Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.

The surprise is how much sleep affects academic performance and emotional stability, as well as phenomena that we assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. A few scientists theorize that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure: damage that one can’t sleep off like a hangover. It’s even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tweener and teen—moodiness, depression, and even binge eating—are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.

Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University is one of the authorities in the field. A couple of years ago, Sadeh sent 77 fourth-graders and sixth-graders home with randomly drawn instructions to either go to bed earlier or stay up later for three nights. Each child was given an actigraph (a wristwatchlike device that’s equivalent to a seismograph for sleep activity), which enabled Sadeh’s team to learn that the first group managed to get 30 minutes more sleep per night. The latter got 31 minutes less sleep.

After the third night’s sleep, a researcher went to the school in the morning to test the children’s neurobiological functioning. The test they used is highly predictive of both achievement-test scores and how teachers will rate a child’s ability to maintain attention in class.

Sadeh knew that his experiment was a big risk. “The last situation I wanted to be in was reporting to my grantors, ‘Well, I deprived the subjects of only an hour, and there was no measurable effect at all, sorry—but can I have some more money for my other experiments?’” he says.

Sadeh needn’t have worried. The effect was indeed measurable—and sizable. The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains.

Sadeh’s findings are consistent with other researchers’ work, all of which points to the large academic consequences of small sleep differences. Dr. Monique LeBourgeois of Brown University studies how sleep affects pre-kindergartners. Virtually all young children are allowed to stay up late on Fridays and Saturdays. Yet she’s discovered that the sleep-shift factor alone is correlated with performance on a standardized school-readiness test. Every hour of weekend shift costs students seven points on the test. Dr. Paul Suratt of the University of Virginia studied the impact of sleep problems on vocabulary-test scores of elementary-school students. He also found a seven-point reduction in scores. Seven points, Suratt notes, is significant: “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.”

Every study done shows a similar connection between sleep and school grades—from a study of second- and third-graders in Chappaqua to a study of eighth-graders in Chicago. The correlations really spike in high school, because that’s when there’s a steep drop-off in kids’ sleep. Dr. Kyla Wahlstrom of the University of Minnesota surveyed more than 7,000 high schoolers in Minnesota about their sleep habits and grades. Teens who received A’s averaged about fifteen more minutes sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged eleven more minutes than the C’s, and the C’s had ten more minutes than the D’s. Wahlstrom’s data was an almost perfect replication of results from an earlier study of more than 3,000 Rhode Island high schoolers by Brown’s Mary Carskadon. Certainly, these are averages, but the consistency of the two studies stands out. Every fifteen minutes counts.

With the benefit of functional MRI scans, researchers are now starting to understand exactly how sleep loss impairs a child’s brain. Tired children can’t remember what they just learned, for instance, because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory.

A different mechanism causes children to be inattentive in class. Sleep loss debilitates our body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest: the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called “executive function.” Among these executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, the prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions. So tired people have difficulty with impulse control, and their abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions. A tired brain perseverates—it gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly returning to the same answer it already knows is erroneous.

Convinced by the mountain of studies, a handful of school districts around the nation are starting school later in the morning. The best known of these is in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, where the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable. “Truly flabbergasting,” said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director for SAT Program Relations, on hearing the results.

Another trailblazing school district is Lexington, Kentucky’s, which also moved its start time an hour later. After the time change, teenage car accidents in Lexington were down 16 percent. The rest of the state showed a 9 percent rise.

Although the evidence is telling, few districts have followed this lead. Conversely, 85 percent of America’s public high schools start before 8:15 a.m. Thirty-five percent start at or before 7:30 a.m. In New York City, each school principal sets his own school schedule, and a randomized sample of 50 of the city’s 500 public high schools revealed that 30 percent begin by or before 7:30. At Midwood, class starts at seven on the dot; Van Buren lets you slide in at 7:05.

Obstacles to later start times are numerous. Having high schools start earlier often allows buses to first deliver the older students, then do a second run with the younger children. This could mean doubling the size of the bus fleet. Teachers prefer driving to school before other commuters clog the roads. Coaches worry their student athletes will miss games because they’re still in class at kickoff time.

Dr. Mark Mahowald, a University of Minnesota professor who runs a sleep clinic, has been at the center of many school start-time debates, and he dismisses those claims. “Of all the arguments I’ve heard over school start-times, not one person has argued that children learn more at 7:15 a.m. than at 8:30.”

Parents and educators might remain skeptical about the importance of the lost hour, but the sleep-research community considers the evidence irrefutable. Their convictions hardened as scientists began to understand sleep’s vital role in synthesizing and storing memories.

Dr. Matthew Walker of UC Berkeley explains that during sleep, the brain shifts what it learned that day to more efficient storage regions of the brain. Each stage of sleep plays a unique role in capturing memories. For example, studying a foreign language requires learning vocabulary, auditory memory of new sounds, and motor skills to correctly enunciate new words. The vocabulary is synthesized by the hippocampus early in the night during “slow-wave sleep,” a deep slumber without dreams. The motor skills of enunciation are processed during Stage 2 non-rem sleep, and the auditory memories are encoded across all stages. Memories that are emotionally laden get processed during R.E.M. sleep. The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.

To consolidate these memories, certain genes appear to up-regulate during sleep; they literally turn on, or get activated. One of these genes is essential for synaptic plasticity, the strengthening of neural connections. The brain does synthesize some memories during the day, but they’re enhanced and concretized during the night: New inferences and associations are drawn, leading to insights the next day.

Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 41 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket.

“We have an incendiary situation today,” Walker remarks, “where the intensity of learning that kids are going through is so much greater, yet the amount of sleep they get to process that learning is so much less. If these linear trends continue, the rubber band will soon snap.”

While the neurocognitive sleep discoveries are impressive, there’s equally groundbreaking research on how sleep affects metabolism.

Five years ago, already aware of an association between sleep apnea and diabetes, Dr. Eve Van Cauter at the University of Chicago discovered a “neuroendocrine cascade” that links sleep to obesity.

Sleep loss increases the hormone ghrelin, which signals hunger, and decreases its metabolic opposite, leptin, which suppresses appetite. Sleep loss also elevates the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol is lipogenic, meaning it stimulates your body to make fat. Human growth hormone is also disrupted. Normally secreted as a big pulse at the beginning of sleep, growth hormone is essential for the breakdown of fat.

It’s drilled into us that we need to be more active to lose weight. So it spins the mind to hear that a key to staying thin is to spend more time doing the most sedentary inactivity humanly possible. Yet this is exactly what some scientists seem to be finding. In light of Van Cauter’s discoveries, sleep scientists have performed a flurry of analyses on children. All the studies point in the same direction: On average, children who sleep less are fatter than children who sleep more. This isn’t just in the U.S.; scholars around the world are considering it, as they watch sleep data fall and obesity rates rise in their own countries.

Three foreign studies showed strikingly similar results. One analyzed Japanese elementary students, one Canadian kindergarten boys, and one young boys in Australia. They all showed that kids who get less than eight hours of sleep have about a 300 percent higher rate of obesity than those who get a full ten hours of sleep. Within that two-hour window, it was a “dose-response” relationship, according to the Japanese scholars.

In Houston public schools, according to a University of Texas at Houston study, adolescents’ odds of obesity went up 80 percent for each hour of lost sleep.

Sleep’s role in obesity is a comparatively new theory, and one difficult to prove in a controlled experiment. But the traditional approach to solving childhood obesity is an abject failure. The federal government spends over a billion dollars a year on nutrition-education programs in our schools. A recent analysis by McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, found that of 57 such programs, 53 had no effect whatsoever, and the four remaining programs’ results were meager at best.

For a long time, there’s been one culprit to blame for these failed efforts: television. Rather than running around the neighborhood like when we were young, today’s kids sit in front of the boob tube an average of 3.3 hours a day. The connection to obesity seemed so obvious that few people thought it needed to be supported scientifically.

Last year, Dr. Elizabeth Vandewater at the University of Texas at Austin got fed up with hearing scholars blame it all on television. “It’s treated as gospel without any evidence,” she says. “It’s just bad science.” Vandewater analyzed the best large data set available, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has extensively surveyed 8,000 families since 1968. She found that obese kids watch no more television than kids who aren’t obese. All the thin kids watch massive amounts of television, too. There was no statistical correlation between obesity and media use, period. “It’s just not the smoking gun we assumed it to be.”

Vandewater examined the children’s time diaries, and she realized why the earlier research had got it wrong. “Children trade functionally equivalent things. If the television’s off, they don’t go play soccer,” she says. “They do some other sedentary behavior.”

In fact, while obesity has spiked exponentially since the seventies, kids watch only seven minutes more TV a day. Although they do average a half-hour of video games and Internet surfing on top of television viewing, the leap in obesity began in 1980, well before home video games and the invention of the Web browser. This doesn’t mean it’s healthy to watch television. But it does mean that something other than television is making kids heavier.

“We’ve just done diet and exercise studies for a hundred years and they don’t work well, and it’s time to look for different causes,” says Dr. Richard Atkinson, co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Obesity.

Despite how persuasive all this science is, somehow it still seems like a huge leap of faith to consider giving back an hour of our children’s lives to slumber. Statistical correlations are fine evidence for scientists, but as parents, we want more—we want control.

Dr. Judith Owens runs a sleep clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, affiliated with Brown. Recently, a father came in with his 15-year-old daughter, who was complaining of severe headaches. Interviewing the patient, Owens quickly learned that her daily routine was a brutal grind; after violin lessons, bassoon lessons, dance classes, and the homework from honors classes, she was able to get only five hours of sleep a night before waking every morning at 4:30 to hustle off to the gym. The father wanted to know if a lack of sleep could be causing her headaches. Owens told him that was probably the case. She recommended his daughter cut back on her schedule.

The word probably made this father hesitant. He would let her cut back, but only if Owens could prove, in advance, that sacrificing an activity would stop the headaches. Sure, he knew that sleep was important, but was it more important than honors French? Was it more important than getting into a great college?

Owens tried her standard argument. “Would you let your daughter ride in a car without a seat belt? You have to think of sleep the same way.” But in the father’s mind, he saw the transaction the other way around: Cutting back was putting his daughter at risk. What if the headaches didn’t stop and she gave up one of her great passions, like dance, for no reason?

Long before children become overscheduled high schoolers gunning for college, parents start making trade-offs between their kids’ sleep and their other needs. This is especially true in the last hour of a child’s day, a time zone let’s call “the Slush Hour.” The Slush Hour is both a rush to sleep and a slush fund of potential time, sort of a petty-cash drawer from which we withdraw ten-minute increments. During the Slush Hour, children should be in bed, but there are so many competing priorities. As a result, sleep is treated much like the national debt—What’s another half-hour on the bill? We’re surviving; kids can, too.

Sleep is a biological imperative for every species on Earth. But humans alone try to resist its pull. Instead, we see sleep not as a physical need but a statement of character. It’s considered a sign of weakness to admit fatigue, and it’s a sign of strength to refuse to succumb to slumber. Sleep is for wusses.

But perhaps we are blind to the toll it is taking on us. The University of Pennsylvania’s David Dinges did an experiment shortening adults’ sleep to six hours a night. After two weeks, they reported they were doing okay. Yet on a battery of tests, they proved to be just as impaired as someone who has stayed awake for 24 hours straight.

Dinges did the experiment to demonstrate how sleep loss is cumulative, and how easily our judgment can be fooled by sleep deprivation. Nevertheless, it’s easy to read his research and think, “I would suffer, but not that bad. I would be the exception.” We’ve coped on too-little sleep for years and managed to get by. But when it comes to a child’s developing brain, is just getting by enough?


Article retrieved from: http://nymag.com/news/features/38951/index4.html
Image retrieved from retrieved from: http://files.myopera.com/meoc/albums/756598/6638_ Baby_ Sleep.jpg

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Pros and Cons of Baby Walkers :Everything a Mom Want to Know about Baby Walkers

There are many advantages of using baby walker. One is to be proud of giving a valuable gift to the babies and the baby will be happy inside it. So if we put the baby in walker then parents can do all the works without any tension. They think that the baby may walk more earlier.

Due to the above reasons when the child reaches the age of 5months the parents’ forced to buy the baby walker for their babies. But they are not even remembered of its side effects caused by these baby walkers. When the number of accidents caused by these walkers the Government of Canada prohibited this in Canada . Read my previous hub on BabyDiapers
Side effects caused by baby walkers.


* The recent studies brought out that children who uses the Baby walker will walk slower that the others. So that there will be a difference of about 2 to 3 weeks.
* Usually the bones above to that of knee help in walking but the child who uses the baby walker is done with the help of the bones below the knees.
* Since the child in the baby walker keeps on walking the tendency of manual walking arises slowly only. So the child may not even get the balance of walking. Hence, they walk later than that of others.
* Many walkers are designed in such a way that the baby cannot see their legs while walking. They cannot even recognize that they walk with the help of their legs.
* The children even show some different mode of walking than that of an ordinary child. The legs of those child are bended than that of an ordinary child. So that the way of walking may change and even becomes difficult to change as that of an ordinary man.
* Within a few time the child can reach wherever he needs with the help of the walker.

So that the other members of the family should be aware of this fact and should not keeps poisonous or any such items to their reach. Dangerous things like knife, needles, pins etc have to be kept safe elsewhere. Items such as sharp-headed furniture, door sides are to be always noted that they are moved from the way of fully opened so that to avoid accidents to the little ones.

By Kevin Peter
Retrieved from http://hubpages.com/hub/Pros-and-Cons-of-Baby-Walkers

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