Word: development
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Tutors will also help children develop library skills and build their vocabulary...
Although Harvard has not been subjecting us to wine-tasting tests, the College is definitely attempting to develop some sort of taste, an appreciation of high culture in all its students. Take Literature And Arts B, for instance. Out of the 18 courses offered, only three focus on the twentieth century. Now, this phenomenon is hardly the fault of the Core. Instead, society has deemed that certain tastes need to be cultivated in the intelligentsia; Jeopardy-like trivia does not suffice. True taste relies on the appreciation of certain arts and literatures which are not in popular demand, for instance...
Deprived of a stimulating environment, a child's brain suffers. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, for example, have found that children who don't play much or are rarely touched develop brains 20% to 30% smaller than normal for their age. Laboratory animals provide another provocative parallel. Not only do young rats reared in toy-strewn cages exhibit more complex behavior than rats confined to sterile, uninteresting boxes, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found, but the brains of these rats contain as many as 25% more synapses per neuron. Rich experiences, in other words...
...bursts of electricity shoot through the brain, knitting neurons into circuits as well defined as those etched onto silicon chips. The results are those behavioral mileposts that never cease to delight and awe parents. Around the age of two months, for example, the motor-control centers of the brain develop to the point that infants can suddenly reach out and grab a nearby object. Around the age of four months, the cortex begins to refine the connections needed for depth perception and binocular vision. And around the age of 12 months, the speech centers of the brain are poised...
Even more fundamental, says Dr. Bruce Perry of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, is the role parents play in setting up the neural circuitry that helps children regulate their responses to stress. Children who are physically abused early in life, he observes, develop brains that are exquisitely tuned to danger. At the slightest threat, their hearts race, their stress hormones surge and their brains anxiously track the nonverbal cues that might signal the next attack. Because the brain develops in sequence, with more primitive structures stabilizing their connections first, early abuse is particularly damaging. Says Perry: "Experience...