How Boys and Girls Learn Differently

David Chadwell, the country’s first—and only—state coordinator of single gender education, walks us through the gender differences.

At a primary school Manning, a small town 65 miles east of Columbia, South Carolina, second grade teachers Holly Garneau and Anna Lynne Gamble are convinced that segregating elementary-age boys and girls produces immediate academic improvement—in both genders. Eager to capitalize on their past progress, the two created a teaching plan for the upcoming semester. The kids will be in a coed environment for homeroom, lunch, and recess, then divide up for four hours each day to learn their math, science, reading and social studies. But first, Garneau and Gamble need the parents’ approval. That’s where David Chadwell, South Carolina’s coordinator of single gender education, comes in.



He doesn’t argue the politics of the issue. He emphasizes the science “These (learning) differences are tendencies, not absolutes. That is important,” he tells the group. “However, we can teach boys and girls based on what we now know because of medical technology.”

Just as he’s explained to hundreds of parents and teachers across the state, Chadwell patiently walks the Manning crowd through how boys and girls perceive the world.

“They see differently. Literally,” he begins. Male and female eyes are not organized in the same way, he explains. The composition of the male eye makes it attuned to motion and direction. “Boys interpret the world as objects moving through space,” he says. “The teacher should move around the room constantly and be that object.”

The male eye is also drawn to cooler colors like silver, blue, black, grey, and brown. It’s no accident boys tend to create pictures of moving objects like spaceships, cars, and trucks in dark colors instead of drawing the happy colorful family, like girls in their class.

The female eye, on the other hand, is drawn to textures and colors. It’s also oriented toward warmer colors—reds, yellow, oranges—and visuals with more details, like faces. To engage girls, Chadwell says, the teacher doesn’t need to move as much, if at all. Girls work well in circles, facing each other. Using descriptive phrases and lots of color in overhead presentations or on the chalkboard gets their attention.

Parents tilt their heads, curious to hear more.

Boys and girls also hear differently. “When someone speaks in a loud tone, girls interpret it as yelling,” Chadwell says. “They think you’re mad and can shut down.” Girls have a more finely tuned aural structure; they can hear higher frequencies than boys and are more sensitive to sounds. He advises girls’ teachers to watch the tone of their voices. Boys’ teachers should sound matter of fact, even excited. Chadwell’s voice sounds much more forceful as he explains.

Chadwell continues. A boy’s autonomic nervous system causes them to be more alert when they’re standing, moving, and the room temperature is around 69 degrees. Stress in boys, he says, tends to increase blood flow to their brains, a process that helps them stay focused. This won’t work for girls, who are more focused seated in a warmer room around 75 degrees. Girls also respond to stress differently. When exposed to threat and confrontation, blood goes to their guts, leaving them feeling nervous or anxious.

“Boys will rise to a risk and tend to overestimate their abilities,” he says. Teachers can help them by getting them to be more realistic about results,” he says. “Girls at this age shy away from risk, which is exactly why lots of girls’ programs began in the private sector. Teachers can help them learn to take risks in an atmosphere where they feel confident about doing so.”

It’s an aha! moment for many of the parents, who seem to understand.

These differences can be accommodated in the classroom, Chadwell adds. “Single gender programs are about maximizing the learning.”

source: readers digest

Superworms: The Metal Lovers

Heavy Metal Eating Superworms unearthed in U.K.

Newly evolved "superworms" that feast on toxic waste could help cleanse polluted industrial land, a new study says.

These hardcore heavy metal fans, unearthed at disused mining sites in Britain and Wales, devour lead, zinc, arsenic, and copper.

The earthworms excrete a slightly different version of the metals, making them easier for plants to suck up. Harvesting the plants would leave cleaner soil behind.

"These worms seem to be able to tolerate incredibly high concentrations of heavy metals, and the metals seem to be driving their evolution," said lead researcher Mark Hodson of the University of Reading in England.

"If you took an earthworm from the back of your garden and put it in these soils, it would die," Hodson said.

DNA analysis of lead-tolerant worms living at Cwmystwyth, Wales, show they belong to a newly evolved species that has yet to be named, he said.

Two other superworms, including an arsenic-munching population from southwest England, are also likely new to science, Hodson said.

"It's a good bet they are also different species, but we haven't categorically proved that," he said.

The findings were announced in September at the British Association Festival of Science in Liverpool.

Micro Processors

Hodson's team's investigation used x-rays to zap worms with intense light, allowing them to track metal particles a thousand times smaller than a grain of salt.

The findings suggest the arsenic-tolerant population produces a special protein that "wraps up the metal and keeps it inert and safe so it doesn't interact with the earthworms," Hodson said.

The lead-eating Welsh worms likewise use a protein to render the metal harmless inside their bodies, he added.

The toxicity of the metal particles once they have passed through the worms isn't yet known, since the protective protein wrappings will degrade over time, the study authors noted.

But experiments suggest the superworms make the metals easier for plants to extract from the soil, Hodson said.

"The earthworms don't necessarily render the metals less toxic, but they do seem to make them available for plant uptake," he said. This raises this possibility of using the earthworms as part of efforts to clean up land contaminated by mining and heavy industry.

Plant Mining

The long-term aim is to breed and then release the worms at polluted sites to speed up the process of soil development and help kick-start the ecosystem's rehabilitation, Hodson said.

Plants could be used to extract toxic metals once the superworms have got to work, he added.

This in turn could boost the development of methods for using plants to mine metals.

"The goal at the end of the rainbow is that the plants become so efficient at it that you can use them as a source of metal in industrial processes," Hodson said. "So you just crop off the plants and take them to a processing plant."

Peter Kille of the School of Biosciences at Cardiff University in Wales has also been tracking the metal-eating worms.

He said previous studies show it takes earthworms many years to improve polluted soils. While the new superworms should prove a useful tool, even they can't compete with industrial cleanup processes that take one to two years.

The worms, however, are an excellent way to diagnose metal concentrations in contaminated land, Kille said.

"Basically you can see the earthworms as biological dipsticks of the soil toxicity and the metal levels," he said.

And the superworms are perfect subjects for studying evolution in action, Kille added.

"What's really interesting is that each patch of high metal creates a unique evolutionary event," he said. The worms either develop new ways of dealing with the metals or find solutions similar to other populations.

"Each time it happens it's a localized event, and it allows us to study the processes of evolution that create the adaptation," he said.

source: national geographic

How Our Eyes See Movement?

Eyes and Brain seeing movement

When an object moves fast, we follow it with our eyes: our brain correspondingly calculates the speed of the object and adapts our eye movement to it. This in itself is an enormous achievement, yet our brain can do even more than that.

In the real world, a car will typically accelerate or brake faster than, say, a pedestrian. But the control of eye movement in fact responds more sensitively to changes in the speed of fast moving objects than slow moving objects. "Gain control" is the name for this phenomenon, which has been known for some time now, but which has now just been recently analyzed more closely by a group working with associate professor Dr. Stefan Glasauer from the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München. The researchers determined the location in the brain where gain control is calculated, and what neuronal networks are behind this complex process. The results were postulated in a mathematical model and experimentally verified - and could be of great help in the diagnosis of eye movement disorders.

Eye movement control

Eye movement control is not exactly a new field of research. We already know, for example, that different regions of the cerebral cortex are involved in eye tracking movements. These include "Area MST" and the so-called frontal eye fields, or FEFs for short. Nerve cells in Area MST mainly reflect the speed of the eye or target motion, whereas cells in the FEFs mainly respond to changes in speed. These insights have been obtained mostly from human behavioral experiments and from neurophysiological studies.

Computer Model of The Eye

But the aim of the scientists under the direction of Glasauer, his coworker Ulrich Nuding and Professor Ulrich Büttner of the Neurological Clinic at LMU Munich was now to amalgamate these insights into a computer model that actually explains this eye movement control. The new model simulates the most important circuits required for controlling eye tracking movement. In Area MST, the speed of the target object is calculated and compared with the momentary eye speed in order to adapt it accordingly. The FEFs are the actual location where the gain control takes place; this is where the sensitivity of eye movement to changes in speed is defined.

In order to verify their models in studies, the scientists joined forces with colleagues at University College in London: they had subjects follow a dot on a screen with their eyes. The activity of the FEFs was briefly disrupted by so-called "transcranial magnetic stimulation". This technology can influence individual, targeted areas of the brain for a few seconds. The experiments did indeed confirm the predictions of the models: as long as the observed object was moving at a constant speed, a disruption of the FEFs had little effect on eye movement control.

The sensitivity of the eye movement to changes in speed, on the other hand, did not increase sufficiently at higher speeds when the FEFs were disrupted. It follows that the gain control is determined in the FEFs depending on the speed of the eye or the target. In short, the faster an object moves, the greater the adaptability. "With this, we have managed for the first time to explain the purpose of parallel anatomic paths in neuronal processing for eye tracking," says Glasauer. Sensitivity control also exhibits interesting parallels to visual attention control, for which the FEFs are also important. Therefore, it can very well be regarded as an attention mechanism within the eye tracking system.

source: science to life

Is There a Link Between Creativity and Mood Disorders?

Experts ponder link between creativity, mood disorders

The works of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide September 12, are famous for their obsessively observed detail and emotional nuance.

Certain characteristics of his prose -- hypersensitivity and constant rumination, or persistent contemplation -- reflect a pattern of temperament that some psychology researchers say connects mental illness, especially bipolar disorder and depression, with creativity.

There have been more than 20 studies that suggest an increased rate of bipolar and depressive illnesses in highly creative people, says Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and author of the "An Unquiet Mind," a memoir of living with bipolar disorder.

Experts say mental illness does not necessarily cause creativity, nor does creativity necessarily contribute to mental illness, but a certain ruminating personality type may contribute to both mental health issues and art.

"Unquestionably, I think a major link is to the underlying temperaments of both bipolar illness and depression, of reflectiveness and so forth," Jamison said.

This theory could help explain why eminent artists throughout history, from composer Robert Schumann to poet Sylvia Plath to Wallace -- suffered mood disorders.

"It's pretty clear if you read [Wallace's] books that he was a very obsessive, kind of ruminating guy," said Paul Verhaeghen, associate professor of psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology.

"You can see it in his sentences. ... They're breathless and they need to be annotated, and the annotations need to be annotated again."

The research of Verhaeghen and colleagues shows when people are in a reflective mode, they may become more creative, depressed, or both. Previous research shows that when people are in a ruminating mode, they are more likely to be depressed, he said.

"If you think about stuff in your life and you start thinking about it again, and again, and again, and you kind of spiral away in this continuous rumination about what's happening to you and to the world -- people who do that are at risk for depression," he said.

Verhaeghen, who is also a novelist and describes himself as a "somewhat mood disordered person," had a particular interest in the connection between creativity and this ruminating state of mind.

"One of the things I do is think about something over and over and over again, and that's when I start writing," he said.

Sensitivity to one's surroundings is also associated with both creativity and depression, according to some experts.

Creative people in the arts must develop a deep sensitivity to their surroundings -- colors, sounds, and emotions, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Such hypersensitivity can lead people to worry about things that other people don't worry about as much, he said, and can lead to depression.

"The arts are more dangerous [than other professions] because they require sensitivity to a large extent," he said. "If you go too far you can pay a price -- you can be too sensitive to live in this world."

Terence Ketter is professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University.

Ketter and his colleagues compared a healthy control group with bipolar patients, depression patients, and a control group of graduate students in writing and the arts.

They found that people with bipolar disorder scored better -- up to about 50 percent higher -- on creativity tests than the healthy control group. The creative control group had about the same increase in score relative to the healthy control group.

But more research is needed, says Ketter. The study does not explain the connection or show a causal relationship, he said.

Some have pointed out that being engaged in creative pursuits makes a person more open to experience, while others say the pressure of being engaged in the arts causes negative emotion, according to Ketter.

Still, the temperamental characteristics in question are thought to be somewhat inherent.

"It's a little hard to argue that engaging in creative activity could create the temperament, and it may be a little bit more possible that this temperament gives you a creative advantage," he said.

Verhaeghen's theory that rumination contributes to negative emotions generally sounds plausible and in some ways consistent with his own views, said Ketter.

Many hope that this type of research will be helpful in developing better strategies to manage and detect mental illness. These strategies can sometimes mean the difference between life and death.

"Tragically, mood disorders can still present a sudden death in people who have been undiagnosed and untreated, and die from the illness," says Ketter.

More specifically, Ketter says, just as heart disease sometimes presents itself for the first time as a fatal heart attack, mental illness sometimes presents itself for the first time as a suicide.

source: cnn health