Word: braining
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Considering that there's essentially no science to support it, the Mozart effect has had a pretty good run. Parents all over the U.S. have been playing the Austrian composer's music to their infants and toddlers on the theory that it stimulates brain development. Even a few state governments have got into the act: Georgia and Tennessee are giving classical-music CDs to new mothers, and Florida has mandated that state-run day-care facilities play such music each...
...fact, though, the original research behind this attractive notion said nothing about infants or even about intelligence, and it certainly made no claims about brain development. All it showed was that a group of college students did better on a battery of specialized tests shortly after listening to Mozart--and to make matters worse, no scientist has been able to duplicate those results, despite numerous attempts...
...book to be published next month makes clear, neurologists know very little about how the brain develops in the first few years of life. In The Myth of the First Three Years, John Bruer, president of the McDonnell Foundation, based in St. Louis, Mo., argues that much of the advice parents are getting about how to make their very young kids smarter and more talented is based on gross exaggerations of brain science. So, he says, is the notion, suggested by some advocacy groups, that brain development all but shuts down after age three. Too much focus on this...
Surprisingly, most of his targets agree with Bruer--to a point. "It's quite true," says Dr. Charles Nelson, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, "that there aren't any studies looking at brain development in young children." And Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, an educational organization whose advice-laden website is a target of Bruer's ire, acknowledges that "there have been some who have stretched the science...
...sign language, if they're deaf--they gradually lose the capacity to learn it at all. Similarly, kids who have uncorrected eye disorders early on will lose the capacity to coordinate the vision in both eyes. "We can't prove conclusively that these deficits involve the wiring of the brain," admits Kuhl. "But we're pretty sure it isn't happening...