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Learning, Arts and the Brain

Edited Transcript

March 4, 2008

Dana Center, Washington, D.C.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Good morning, everyone, I’m Bill Safire. About three

years ago, we sat down with a great cognitive neuroscientist, indeed, the father

of cognitive neuroscience, as he is called in the trade – that’s Professor Mike

Gazzaniga. And we said that there’s been a lot of wishful thinking and some

good research on the question of does a study of the arts, the performing arts,

music, dance, drama, have an effect on the brain of young people and old? And

is that effect transferred to other things? We see mathematicians who are

musicians and vice versa. Is it all coincidence, or is there some scientific

reason to believe that a study of the arts can help in other studies, in academic

studies?

The Dana Foundation, has been very active both in cognitive neuroscience and

in the help of training teachers – training artists to teach in public schools. So

we put those two together and we went to Mike Gazzaniga and said, “Can you

gather together the best minds in the mind field and pose this question to

them?” I’ll let him explain what happened next. And today we have the results

of a three-year study by seven universities. Mike Gazzaniga, who’s the head of

the Sage Center for the Studies of the Mind at the University of California at

Santa Barbara – Mike, will you bring us up to date with what this remarkable

group you have assembled has found?

MICHAEL GAZZANIGA: Many, many people over the years have looked

for origins of the artistic impulse in the chimp to see if we can find out whether

they have this impulse to seek expression? And basically, while there are some

very cute pictures that chimps have drawn, basically what they do is they mix

all the colors into brown and mix it up on paper and urinate on it.

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[LAUGHTER]

So it’s not a large factor in their life. They, in fact, spend seven hours of their

day, I recently learned from Richard Ringham at Harvard, chewing their food.

So then 40,000 years ago, there was an explosion in our species of people

beginning to ornament themselves, people beginning to express themselves in

an artistic form. And it’s a time when the geneticists now know that the gene,

microcephalin, which is responsible for brain size, had several changes going

on. And it’s been casually hypothesized that maybe something was going on

there that was changing circuits in our head that made this expression crucial,

essential to the human. And it raises the question, do aesthetic experiences

make our brains work better? And this has actually been proposed by Nick

Humphrey, the British neuroscientist, philosopher, psychologist. Where he

claims that aesthetics are fundamental to learning. That there’s something that

occurs at a critical point through play and through other learning of various

sorts of artistic expression during a critical period that enhances our capacity to

learn and is fundamental. And the way he sort of puts it is that while we have a

certain hardware, a disposition for these things, it takes the environmental

input from whatever culture you’re in to develop those things to their fullness.

And in developing those mechanisms, those internal brain mechanisms to their

fullness, the substructure for learning is enhanced.

So that’s an idea that’s out there. Other evolutionary psychologists have said

that by developing the capacity for pretense, that by separating reality from

pretense that we have games we can play in our head that prepare us for all of

the difficulties and surprise decisions we have to make as humans.

So these are ideas that are out there by the evolutionary community. And why

did I get involved? I got involved, like all of us get involved – I had a personal

interest in this. This is a blatant little one-minute film that shows my two kids

when they were 14 and 16 – that’s my son and my daughter, Francesca, and

they were musicians and they’re now off to do smart things. And the question

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is why was there music in their early life and their subsequent academic

success? Is it genes, is it the teaching? Their teacher, Wayne, who’s one of the

great horn teachers in California. Or is it ultimately just amount of practice?

So, just to remind ourselves, I’ll show you what they did and then I’ll take it

apart in a couple more minutes.

[VIDEO PLAYS]

It’s been already stated, that there’s this well-known correlation that kids who

are exposed to the arts do well in school. What is the correlation? And is it

causal, as suggested by the evolutionary psychologists? That idea is out there.

If you read that literature it’s very dense. Or is it simply a correlation – that

kids who get their act together, know how to practice, know how to plan their

day – just do that more generally? And if it is causal, what is the underlying

brain mechanism? That is a particular issue that this group wanted to look at.

What are we talking about here? Well, let’s take a metaphor from rowing. Any

rower in the room knows that all winter-long you spend your time on these

machines and practice a set of muscles. And the reason you do that is that

because when you finally get on the water, you will use those same muscle

groups to actually execute the skills – the much more complex skills involved

in rowing. So what the model is in the brain is that as you learn particular acts

in the sensory domain – and here to the left is the auditory domain – you learn

to pick out a pitch of a particular kind, you see the cortical representation for

learning a particular pitch actually grows. It becomes more massive in the

brain. And the question is, by practicing and rehearsing that part of the cortex,

do you, in fact, enhance maybe other circuitries that are involved in that same

part of the brain? It’s a baby idea but it’s an idea that may well be active in this

thing.

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Then there’s a contrast, and I just want to show you that maybe this is not the

way it is. Maybe there are actually specific nerve circuits that are involved in

particular sorts of skills, such as music, dance and art, and they’re sort of

neurologic islands. You just sort of have them or you don’t. And you can buff

them up and practice them, but there’s no general cognition that comes in and

specifies the skill.

We learn so much in neurology by particular patients that demonstrate

something, and this person is blind, hemiparetic and retarded. Not a fast start to

life. And yet he has this incredible musical skill where he just hears things and

has learned to play them. And you’ll notice in this little short snip that he plays

as if he has two hands, the way he’s playing this tune. Now this comes right

out of the neuropsychological literature.

[VIDEO PLAYS]

So when you look at that – and musicologists look at that – he has the form of

music and he modulates in a way that a musician would be sensitive to. So it’s

obviously – this is a man that cannot add two plus two, but he has this sort of

specialized skill. So what’s going on? What’s going on in the brain? Well, here

you go. I took on this assignment for the reason stated, and I said, you know,

let’s get the best people in the country – and I can toot their horn, they won’t

toot their horn. We got the best people and they’re happily in our country

distributed at many institutions – they’re not all in one place. And with the new

Internet you don’t have to be in one place anymore. You can be distributed,

live where you want to live and do what you want to do. So we’ve involved

Oregon, Berkeley, Stanford, Santa Barbara, Michigan, Dartmouth, Harvard.

And today out of all that group we have our three presenters, Michael Posner,

who is truly the father of cognitive neuroscience. He’s been studying the issue

of attention, the central issue in all of cognitive neuroscience. And Mike has

really been the person that has established it as a – sort of the premiere issue in

the field.

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Liz Spelke is one of the most genius experimental psychologists in the world.

She studies children in a way that tries to sort out what exactly it is that they

know and what they learn during their developmental years. And Liz is in my

estimation studies deep biologic questions, even though she doesn’t use a brain

scanner.

And finally, Brian Wandell is really one of the world’s leading visual

scientists, who has now become expert in the new techniques of brain imaging

and is out on the West Coast at Stanford. And all three are members of the

National Academy of Science and have won too many awards for me to

review.

So with that, the plan is here to start the presentations with Mike. And, Mike,

here you go.

MICHAEL POSNER: Well, even though we’re both being credited as fathers,

I don’t have any pictures of my children.

[LAUGHTER]

Our work on this project started with questionnaires that we gave to

undergraduate students, and we found that trying to get a handle on the

structure of the various arts forms, we found that playing music and liking to

listening to music were highly related. As was dancing and observing dance, or

watching plays, or writing. So we found that production and performance were

highly correlated. And we also found that the various art forms fell into

clusters, which were related to each other. There was a cluster of visual arts,

one of linguistic arts, one of movement arts, and then of music. And rather

surprisingly, the liking of these art forms was uncorrelated across these

clusters. As if there were somewhat independent liking of different art forms.

We think we know a little bit of why that’s true. We also found that each of the

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arts forms independently correlated with a general aesthetics factor, which is a

self-report on your feelings of creativity and imagination.

Now, our colleague, Stan Dehaene has argued, and I think very effectively,

that the brain has portal networks of neural areas that are present even before

the learning of a high level skill like mathematics. So although you learn to do

mathematics, the parts of the brain that are critical for the performance of that

skill are present even before the learning of the mathematics really starts.

There are parts of the brain that are interested in quantity, for example. And

from the literature we look to see if we could get clusters of neural areas,

networks that were related to the clusters that we found in our correlations.

And, indeed, there is evidence for networks of neural areas involved in writing

and reading, or linguistic skills, in painting and observing various forms of art

forms, of music and so on. And there are different cortical areas around the

primary motor or sensory areas, which are related or involved in these

networks.

These networks do have overlap, but there’s sufficient independence to make it

reasonable that the liking of one type of art form might be somewhat

independent from liking another type of art form. Although the goals – for

which we were put together as a group – was to show whether general

cognition would be improved by the learning of an art. I think it’s also

important that there are individual networks for these art forms that are

changing with practice, as Mike outlined before.

Now all the art forms are related to general aesthetics. And we found that this

general aesthetics is related itself, very highly correlated with one of the five

most important personality factors – openness. So, if you are open to

experience and if you have an efficient network to carry out a particular art

form, we hypothesize that you are likely to be engaged in the training of the art

form. Now this doesn’t mean that teachers are unimportant. Obviously a great

teacher makes a big difference. But we think that people will differ in their

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receptivity to different art forms because of the efficiency of the proto network

that’s involved in the training of that art form. And we hypothesize that if you

have the right proto network and you’re open, then you will be very

enthusiastic about the presentation of that art form.

And what would that enthusiasm do for you? Well, it’s very well known, and

we also find out that children who are involved and enthusiastic about playing

a particular game or engaging in a particular task will sustain their attention

over long periods of time. They will sustain their attention in that particular

activity. And what does sustaining your attention do? Well, we now know that

it trains your attention. And that has vast consequences.

So my colleagues and I developed a training course for six-year olds. It’s

actually only a five-day training course. And we adapted it from the work that

David Washburn and Duane Rumbaugh had done in training monkeys to go up

into space – except we redid all the programs for children four and six years of

age. And before and after we did the training, we tested the attention of these

children and we recorded activity from a large number of electrodes outside

the brain to see if there were changes in the network by the attention training.

Well, the attention training involved, first, learning to use a joystick so that

they were controlling a cat to move to the grass. At first the grass was all the

way around, but over time grass shrinks and mud increases, and the child has

to be very careful. And then they learn to predict where a duck would come out

of a pond and had to move their cursor to the right location.

And then we trained their working memory. And, finally, we allowed them to

resolve conflict, where different stimuli came in indicating different things,

and they had to resolve conflict. And we found that five days of training

improved the network of neural areas underlying this attentional skill. And that

has a lot of consequences. For when you change that neural network you also

improve general cognitive capacity. For example, you improve the work of

these children in intelligence tests. And, subsequently, my colleague, has

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shown that you can predict middle school performance from the efficiency of

these networks.

So we believe that absorbing the child in one of the art forms in a way which

enthusiastically engages their attention will be one way to train the attentional

network. And of course our little five-day experience wasn’t very great, but we

are seeing now literature come out with whole nursery school programs which

are involved in training executive attention and executive function. So there

are ways to do this. The arts play a particular way because of the involvement

or enthusiasm that children with the appropriate background will show in the

arts.

Well, I’m stressing individual differences. Not all children are alike. Why is

that? Well, of course, there are many reasons they aren’t all alike, but one of

the reasons is genetic. And so we’ve examined genes, particularly those related

to the neural modulators dopamine and serotonin, which are related to these

attentional networks. Now, we all have these genes, we all have these

networks, but their efficiencies differ and the genes that we have differ in

interesting slight ways. And we found that the differences between some of

these genes will predict the efficiency of the attentional network.

And one of these genes is of particular interest – it’s the Dopamine Receptor 4

gene. This is the gene, one part of which or one version of which has been

associated with attention deficit disorder. But actually, children that have this

particular version of the gene, although they often are more – will show some

of the characteristics of attention deficit disorder, they don’t have attentional

deficits. Moreover, this gene is one that’s been under positive selection during

the last 50,000 years of human evolution. You might say, well, why would a

gene related to attention deficit disorder be growing? Is that a good thing? And

people have various ideas about why that might be, because this gene is also

related to risk taking. We’ve found something I think quite interesting about

this particular gene. Namely, that if this particular version of the gene is

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present in the child, parental quality will have a big influence on the child’s

behavior. And the behaviors we’re talking about are those related to attention

deficit disorder like impulsivity, or activity level, or risk taking.

However, if they don’t have this version of the DRD4, parental quality doesn’t

matter in these particular temperamental aspects like impulsivity. It shows that

the gene itself isn’t causing things, but in interaction with particular aspects of

the environment. And we’ve come up with a hypothesis that I think might be

useful in our future studies of genes, particularly those that are undergoing

positive selection. Namely, perhaps the reason these genes are undergoing

positive selection is that they make the child more greatly influenced by their

environment, including their parenting, and training of various sorts. So we

usually think of genes as something that are fixed, but in fact, here the gene

may be making it more possible for cultural aspects of the environment to

influence the child’s behavior. Interestingly enough, the adults with this

version of the DRD4 are rather low in their liking of the various forms of the

arts.

Well, I’ve used up my time. So let me just say during our three years of

research we’ve developed the general framework for how it might be that arts

training might influence general cognition. We stress the existence of networks

that are involved in each of the art forms. And so there may as well be special

connections between particular art forms and particular cognition, but at least

we think we have the beginnings of a framework for seeing how the arts might

influence cognition in general.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: I want to start with a disclaimer. Which is that I’ve

spent most of my professional life trying to study – make a little headway in

understanding what I thought was really most important and special about

human cognition, which was our prodigious ability to gain knowledge about

the world and then to use that knowledge to create new tools to transform the

world. The abilities that give rise to mathematics, formal mathematics, and

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science, and technology. And I was feeling pretty good about myself four years

ago, when I was able to look around the field and see that a lot of different

people working from different directions were coming together and getting

some leverage on this question of what makes us capable of doing these

things? We saw this in part through research on nonhuman primates, asking

about the evolutionary origins of capacities for math and science. We saw it in

research on young infants, looking both at what cognitive capacities emerge

first and what capacities stay constant throughout our development.

We saw it through studies of people in remote cultures, asking what’s universal

across our human cognitive capacities, and what’s variable? And we saw it in

studies of children taking the first steps towards understanding formal

mathematics and science, asking how they draw on these basic systems that we

share with infants and other animals. And, finally, studies of adults, asking

when we engage in sophisticated scientific and mathematical reasoning, how

do we so do? So I was feeling that there was beginning to be a story to be told

about what’s special about human nature? What’s unique to humans?

And then I ran into Mike about four years ago, and he said, “Uh, I think you’re

forgetting something. Haven’t humans been artists at least as long as they’ve

been scientists and mathematicians? What about the arts? How can you pretend

to have anything like a grasp of the unique and universal aspects of human

nature if you leave the arts aside?”

So I scratched my head for a while and started thinking about them. And found

that I was particularly thinking about what was already at that point a fairly

well-documented link between mathematics in particular, academic

achievement in general and one arts form, namely, music. It looked as if kids

who were good at music and interested in music were also apt to do quite well

at school in general and in mathematics in particular. But of course

mathematics, formal school academic mathematics is a very complicated set of

activities. And seeing a general relationship like that isn’t really enough to tell

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us what might be going on here. So thanks to Dana, I’ve been able to think

about that and want to tell you just a little about some of the work that we did

and some of our findings. And to do that, I need to start by taking

mathematical reasoning apart.

The research that I was feeling so good about four years ago from all these

converging different perspectives suggests that there are three general

cognitive systems at the foundations of our understanding of symbolic

mathematics. One is a system for representing exact small numbers of objects.

The difference between two apples and three apples. The second is a system

for representing approximate numerical magnitudes – a system that allows you

without counting and at a glance to say, oh, there are between five and ten

things up there. And the third is a system of geometrical representation that

allows you or that child to see that two sides of that box are longer than the

other two sides, and that the sides with the same length are parallel to each

other. Three systems that are quite distinct from each other.

Research on young children also provided evidence that before most children

even get to school, they’ve started to develop three crucial skills that bring

these systems together. One, a skill of verbal counting that allows them to

represent numbers exactly, not just approximately. The, second, a skill that

involves bringing together number with space to develop devices like number

lines and rulers that we can then – allows us to apply our mathematics to the

world. And, third, a skill of forming and using maps. Maps that allow you to

figure out where things are in the environment from their geometrical

relationships.

So with this as background, it’s possible to ask when children get intensive

training in music, do we see enhancements across the board in the basic

foundational abilities, and do we see enhancements in these types of skills?

And the answer so far to both those questions is no. We don’t see a general

across the board change. What we do see, though, is I think a very interesting

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change, which is specific in three respects. First of all, it’s specific to

geometry. We see a change or a difference among children getting music

training and geometrical representations. Second, it’s specific to music training

relative to other arts. And, third, as far as we can see so far, it’s specific to

children who get rather intensive training in the arts.

So what we find is that with intensive training we see an enhancement in

geometrical reasoning and in two of the cognitive skills that draw in part on

geometry, measurement, and maps. And I want to illustrate that today just be

going over the main findings concerning geometrical reasoning and use of

maps. So here’s a sampling of a task that we’ve used in a variety of contexts to

get at geometrical reasoning. This was designed largely by Stan Dehaene,

who’s already been mentioned here. The task is extremely simple. On any

given trial you show people an array of six geometrical figures, five of which

have some abstract geometrical property in common, and the sixth of which

does not. And the question is simply “Which one doesn’t go with the others?”

Now, when you get these, you don’t have the boxes around them. The boxes

here indicate the right answer, so you don’t have to work as you’re listening to

me. Let me just point out a couple of features of this task, though, that I think

are interesting. First of all, the task itself is extremely easy. Easy enough that

you can get a four-year old to do it. And when you present certain relationships

like these over here, four-year olds perform pretty well on them. But, second,

by manipulating the geometric properties you can make the task very hard. So

Harvard undergrads have problems with this item here. And across the

spectrum of items there’s a profile of difficulty.

Now, when this task was taken into the Amazon, we discovered that you see

the same difficulty profile in people in very, very different cultures. People

with no formal education, living very different kinds of lives from the people

that we test in Boston. When you do comparisons of young children to adults,

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you find that adults do much better on the task, but the difficulty profile is the

same. So the hardest items for a child are also the hardest items for an adult.

So, with this background we’re then able to ask, okay, how does performance

on this task vary with music training? And the first thing we did was look at

children with very mild music training. Less than two hours of practice a week

in the home. There we found no relationships at all. Then we looked at

children with moderate music training. About five hours of practice per week,

compared to children with no systematic music training, and we begin to see a

difference. It’s not very large, but it’s there and it’s real on some of our

measures – where music trained children are doing better, particularly on items

that tap Euclidian geometric properties of the environment. Not so much

general properties like closure, but properties like angle, or distance, or sense

relations, mirror image relations.

But the findings get much stronger when we turn from children getting

moderate levels of training to high school students getting very intense training

in the arts. So, the students that we studied practice on average 20 or more

hours per week at their particular art form. Across the school where we did our

studies there are students majoring in five different art forms, two of which

involve music in a serious way, music and dance, but also other art forms that

don’t involve music. And what we find when we compare performance on this

test is a clear benefit for music – the musicians whose performance you see in

red, over the theatre and writing majors, whose performance you see in black.

A clear advantage for music.

Now, interestingly, the visual artists also do very well on this task. They do as

well as the musicians do. I think that’s an interesting finding in its own right

and retrospectively makes a lot of sense. But I’m going to proceed to ignore it

for the rest of my two minutes here.

[LAUGHTER]

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Let me go onto the other task, which is a math reading task. This should’ve

been presented in reverse to give you a sense of how this task worked. What

happened in this task is that a child stands with their back to an array of

objects. The child has not seen the array of objects, and the child is presented

with a simple geometrical map, say, one of these three maps in which the

angle, distance, and sense relations serve to distinguish each of these objects

from the others. But it’s just a two-dimensional map at about a twelfth the size

of the real array of objects behind the child’s back.

And the child, after being presented with such a map is told “See this location

here? Put a ball under the can in that location.” And then the map is taken

away and the child has to turn around and sees an array of objects, which is

oriented differently from the map they saw in an unsystematic, randomly

varying way. Different orientation. And they have to figure out which can they

should go to.

Now, as in the first task I told you about, this is a task that’s comprehensive to

a four-year old, and in certain cases, for example, when you hid something at a

location very distant from everything else, young children perform very well at

it. But again, it can be very difficult in a case where you have to distinguish

mirror image locations, for example, even for adults. So we presented this task

to our students with moderate music training, got no overall difference at

moderate levels. Remember, about five hours per week of music training. But

an interesting relationship emerged when we looked within our sample of

students involving music training. We discovered that the more music training

students had, the better they did on this map task. And then that finding comes

through clearly in the last study where we focus only on students having very

intensive music training. Now, in this case, music trained students do better

than students in any of the art forms lacking music training, including the

visual arts group that I described before.

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So, in summary, it looks as if there is a connection between geometrical

reasoning on the one hand, and training in music on the other. Now, I think the

question – this connection raises many more questions than it answers. So, one

question that it clearly raises is why? What’s the causal direction here? Maybe

students who are particularly good at geometry also turn out to be particularly

good at music and so they’re likely to pursue training and get a lot out of it and

enjoy it. I think that’s plausible. But the effects could also go in the other

direction. It could be that if you’re really good at music, that exercises spatial

abilities and makes you better at math. A different kind of study – training

studies, where we work on one of these capacities and look at effects on the

other would be needed to answer that question.

The other question that isn’t answered, which interests me just as much, is the

how question. What are the cognitive and brain systems that link music, on the

one hand, to geometrical reasoning on the other? Now, one possibility is that

these are quite culture specific high level systems. When children learn music

notation, they use position of notes on a score to convey tonal relationships and

even temporal relationships. When they learn to play the violin they learn that

the length of the string corresponds to the frequency of the note that’s made.

But I’m intrigued by the possibility suggested by the fact that we get these

effects on tasks that count very fundamental systems, that there actually may

be a deeper and more fundamental connection between music and space.

Melodies may activate spatial representations in everybody, even in the

absence of any specific training. And that’s something we’re interested in

looking at.

But however those questions get answered, I do want to end with two general

suggestions. The first concerns the way that we think about the arts – or the

way at least that I was thinking about the arts versus the sciences when I

started this work. I think there’s a tendency to see the arts and the sciences as

fundamentally opposed to each other. One is about creating things, the other is

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about discovering them. One’s about the imagination, the other about the

exercise of reason. One’s done by a group of bohemians, and the other by a

group of nerds, right?

[LAUGHTER]

We see these as really different. And if we see them as different, then it’s

natural to see education and educational policy as facing a conflict. Do we

want our education to be deep and instill a deep understanding and command

of academic skills or do we want it to be broad? I think that these emerging

connections that we see between the arts and cognitive abilities suggests that

these distinctions have been overblown and that the choice between depth and

breadth in education may not be the right choice that we should be making.

[APPLAUSE]

BRIAN WANDELL: I do want to support Liz’s last comments. Thanks very

much for coming here, and thanks to the Dana Foundation for their support.

When Mike called about four years ago, our group was busily studying

reading. And we’re quite passionate about understanding how children develop

the skill of reading. And the big theme in the case of reading, the big point that

has that field gripped is the fact that the ability to manipulate the sounds of

speech – so, for example, if I asked you about the word bat and I said, “What

would that be if I took the buh sound off?” You’d say, “Well, at.” And kids,

who at the age of four or five, before they get taught to read, can do that very

well, end up going on to be pretty good readers by in large. So a lot of the new

reading disciplines, such as open chord and other ways in which people train

reading, train those skills.

So when the question of the arts came up – and if you go to a classroom, I

should say, and listen to the way that curriculum is taught, it’s almost like –

when it’s done well, the teachers are wearing these headphones and moving

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around and keeping the kids actively engaged, and it’s almost like a little

music. Really, it’s pretty close to music. And it became quite interesting to us

to wonder, well, what if you – is it really that specific to teaching the words

and the individual sounds? Suppose you were teaching kids a little bit about

the notes and the rhythms and so forth in music training, would that be

effective also?

And so we took that idea and started to apply it with the tools that my own

group is used to using, which is the study of the brain, and we tried to merge

them together. And the support from the Dana Foundation was really essential

for us in adding onto our existing studies. We were studying in a pretty large

NIH funded study the development of the neural pathways of reading in kids

age about seven to twelve. And without this little additional oomph and a little

arm-twisting from Mike and the interest of these additional colleagues, we

would never have added on the set of questions and issues pertaining to the arts

that we did add on. But we did, and I’m glad to tell you about it.

Now, let me tell you about what we found with just a little bit of background. I

hope you don’t mind. For some of you this’ll be well known; for others maybe

not so much. But when you measure the brain, the brain can be divided

roughly into two major systems. One comprises the cells of the brain, which

are shown here. They cover the brain, the surface. Sometimes you think of the

new parts as the cortex. And it’s about 2 millimeters thick and it’s got about

50,000 neurons per cubic millimeters, and it’s a sheet that kind of covers the

surface. And mostly when you see these brain imaging pictures with kind of a

red spot on it or some yellow thing that says it’s active, that’s telling you about

how active this gray sheet is. And we’ve been able to study the activity in the

human brain in this way – it’s really quite remarkable – only for about – with

some spatial resolution, spatially resolved – only for about 15 years. That’s a

pretty new technology.

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And, in fact, we’ve learned a lot about that. And the main thing I want to say –

I come with enormous literature – but the main thing I want to alert you to is

that we’ve learned a lot about reading and the way in which the specific

mechanisms of the brain work from these studies. And one of the things that’s

really quite surprising is that there are small pieces of the brain that are

essential to the functioning of reading. It’s not to say that everything about

reading is in that place, but, boy, if you don’t have that place, you’re not going

to read. And, in fact, you can see that reversibly in subjects. Mike pointed out

some of the neurological literature that’s been very important in reading.

I’m studying a fellow now, who has epilepsy, and after an epileptic – normally

he reads wonderfully well, and after an epileptic attack he can’t read for about

40 minutes. Just the letters are a jumble. This is actually shockingly common.

You can see this in hospitals. I’ve had friends – I’m at an age now where I’ve

had friends go into hospitals and have had, you know, fever on the brain,

infections in the subdural matter that cause them to lose the ability to read for a

couple of weeks. And then it comes back. And, in fact, we know roughly

where these parts of the gray matter are.

Now, in addition to that one system of the gray matter that covers the brain,

there’s a massive amount of wiring in the brain, just an enormous amount of

wiring that we call the white matter of the brain. That’s shown here. And when

you open up a brain, you can see it looks like a white set of cables that run

back and forth between different places. And the ability to study that in the

human brain is only about six year old. And the only way you can study it

without hurting anybody, non-invasively in the human brain is using magnetic

resonance imaging. And the techniques and the methods for understanding

where these fibers are are really the result of a combined set of experiments

and work form engineers, computer scientists, medical imaging technologists,

just a whole array of people. It’s very interdisciplinary.

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So those kinds of support for that kind of work really hinges in the early phases

on contributions from the Dana Foundation and other independent

organizations. It’s hard to kind of break things into these new areas without the

support of groups like that. And we can make computational estimates of the

positions of these fibers in the human brain now, in experiments that last, oh,

about half an hour.

Okay, so why am I telling you this? Well, one of the first things that – and the

Dana Foundation supported us to go and create a set of tools that we

distributed to the other consortia members. We work particularly with the

groups up in Oregon, and we actually share with anybody at this point. Now,

the reason I’m telling you this is because of a remarkable connection between

the properties of these white matter fibers and a child’s ability to do the basic

sounding out that I opened up with – what we call sometimes phonological

awareness, the ability to manipulate the sounds of speech, and the properties of

these white matter pathways. And in particular, one of these pathways, the one

shown in green, runs through Mike’s favorite part of the brain, the corpus

callosum, which you should all know about Mike’s work on patients whose

corpus callosum has been severed. It’s really quite fantastic.

But, in fact, it’s an enormously important part of the brain. It’s the part that

contains the fibers that hook together the two hemispheres. And there’s a

particular – it’s about 4 millimeters across, set of fibers, when those develop

very nicely and in a healthy way, children seem to do pretty well on these –

hearing the sounds of speech, the ability to manipulate the sounds of speech.

On the other hand, when they don’t seem to develop in the same way, there’s a

pretty big difference between the groups in terms of how well they do. And so

we studied on the same group of children for whom we can measure the

properties of these fibers – the way in which – their integrity. And I can answer

exactly what I mean by that later. How well they did in terms of arts training –

what the impact of arts training was on these kids.

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Now, as Liz pointed out and as the report says quite clearly, this is a

correlation. We didn’t go and separate the kids into two groups and study them

experimentally. But we did absorb a correlation, and it’s a big one in the case

of reading, and it’s one that others have seen – I think it probably jumps out as

sort of the biggest effect. And I don’t know if it’s shocking or not, but it’s

pretty big. Which is that when these kids showed up for our study in year one,

some of them had had a lot of music training and some of them hadn’t. We had

50 kids sampled from around the Bay Area, and there was a lot of variance in

that particular group. And we followed them for the next three years. And we

could look at the kids who had a lot of music experience when they first

showed up – and that would be on the right horizontal axis – and the ones who

basically hadn’t really had any music experience. And then we saw how well

they did in reading fluency three years later, and there was a noticeable

correlation. So the numbers for the correlation coefficient is .43. That means

that there’s a lot of things that affect how well a kid’s going to learn to read –

but yet this little bit of brain and this little bit of education accounted for about

16 percent of the variance.

Now, 16 percent, that’s not huge – it’s not like everything, but it’s a factor.

And there’s a lot of things where you get a little 10 percent boost on

something, that’s good. And so we’re very interested in that observation. We

would never have looked at it, we would never have built the tools without the

support of the Dana Foundation. And we are now, as Liz said, as Mike pointed

out – Mike’s already engaged in the process of starting some intervention

experiments. Helen Nevel from this consortium has started that as well. And

we think that the ideal of actually using the arts training to try to see whether it

creates this benefit or whether the kids who are just, you know, ready for the

music did it and they also were ready for the reading – whether it was just a

correlation is really worth exploring. And not only that, music is good, and fun,

and engaging. And getting kids engaged in stuff is a good thing. So we find

this very promising, and I thank you all for your attention.

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[APPLAUSE]

SAFIRE: Mike, can I ask if we can get a comment from our senior advisor on

science? A brilliant neurologist from Johns Hopkins University. And I wonder

if you would either ask a question or make a general review of what you’ve

just heard, and bring it down to earth a little bit.

GUY McKHANN: [CHUCKLES] Well, thank you. I have watched this

program from its inception and I have learned a lot from the various meetings.

I’d like to put this somewhat in the context of how our thinking about the brain

was and is going on while these people are asking this question. I’ve been

teaching medical students for a very long time, and someone once said that

half of what you teach medical students is wrong – the only problem is you

don’t know which half. Well, I’ve contributed mightily to the wrong half over

the years, and in part it’s in aspects of the brain. ‘Cause we started out with the

idea that you were born with all the neurons you were ever going to have, and

that’s all you were going to get. And we’ve in recently years realized that this

isn’t correct. That we make new neurons as we go along. We’re not quite sure

what role they play, whether they’re very important, and whether this is a

source or a target, if you will, to what we’ve heard about today.

The second is the idea that your brain is very dynamic, and it is changing

throughout your life, not just in little kids. So this issue we’re hearing about the

effect of – an environmental factor, if you will, and what it does to your brain

is right on the forefront of neuroscience research. Now, the third factor is that

we were brought up – and we heard parts of it just now from Dr. Wandell, with

the idea of localization in the brain. This goes back to the days of Broca and

Werneke, that there are certain areas of your brain that were crucial. And that

was really essentially the basis of neurology. Well, we’ve recognized in recent

years that that’s not the way the brain works at all. We have a series of circuits.

Now the easy circuits, like the visual system to a certain extent or the motor

system, those have been worked out. We’re hearing today about an entirely

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different level of circuit, which we really are just beginning to figure out how

to study. And this is particularly true in the human.

So with that background, I do have several questions. So I’ll kind of take them

in order from what I heard this morning and I’m going to put them all out there

and then you guys can decide whether you want to answer them or not. So the

question I have for Mike Posner is – you were talking about the fact that these

circuits are probably there before they’re being utilized, and then somehow the

exposure brings them in. And that they probably differ from one individual to

another. So do you envision in the future that we will actually screen little kids

to say what kind of exposure should they have that they’re likely to be most

receptive to? And the second part of that, will part of that screening be, as you

suggest, on a genetic basis?

I’d like to ask Dr. Spelke a question. How far should we go in trying to drive a

particular cognitive function in a kid? Do you think you can drive a cognitive

function to be better than it actually was going to be? And, if so, do you do that

at the expense of something else? Is there going to be a tradeoff? And I’d like

to ask Dr. Wandell to pick up on this circuit issue. You’re talking about the

structure of circuits here. In the human, how are we going to get at the actual

function of circuits? What’s going to be the technology that’s going to allow us

to do that? So those are some of my thoughts.

POSNER: So, it’s very important to see that there are these networks of neural

areas that are held together, that act together through these white matter

pathways that Brian Wandell is talking about. And they’re common to us. And

because they’re common, they’re built genetically. Now what we have in hand

is not all the genes that build the network, but genes that predict differences in

efficiency in the network among different people. These are probably the same

genes that are building the network, but they’re also dealing to some extent

with the differences, one person from another. And we know a few of these for

a few of the networks – very little really. But at least some idea of a beginning

23

for being able to figure out what are the cause or the development of these

common networks and why people differ.

Now the screening question, I guess I’d rather punt on that. That’s a policy

question. Of course teachers are always sensitive to the differences in abilities

of children. And sometimes they make different reading groups. I remember

being put into the Class C reading group and not being very happy about that. I

don’t know if that’s a good thing. And I don’t know exactly how teachers

ought to take advantage of this new information in trying to help children to

find things that will engage the child’s interest and build the kind of attentional

efficiencies that I think are important. So maybe I’ll just punt on the policy

question.

SPELKE: Okay, so Dr. McKhann’s question to me was, one, can we drive

each of these systems? If we were to undertake training studies, would we see

that we could produce improvements in representing objects, or representing

number, or representing geometrical relationships? And, if so, should we worry

that those improvements could come at the cost of something else? These are

great questions.

Because we haven’t done any training studies yet, we don’t have direct

answers them, but we do have some findings that lead me to think, yes, we can

drive these systems; and, two, when we do so, we’re likely to see more benefits

than costs to doing so. Partly this comes from research that we’ve done with all

of the tasks that I described to you in the Amazon. In the Amazon we’re able to

test adults and children just like we can in Boston, but a big difference is that

the adults have not gone through any system of formal education there,

whereas here they do. And the general thing that we find in case after case is

that, on the one hand, as I emphasized, the Amazonian patterns of performance

look very similar to the Boston pattern of performance, suggesting that there’s

a lot of invariance, and that really the same systems are at work in the two

places. But when we compare Boston children to adults, the adults do better.

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When we compare Amazonian children to adults, performance is equal –

suggesting that what’s leading to improvement in these systems is not just

some intrinsic process of growth, but a set of experiences that probably are

connected in part to formal schooling; may also be connected to other aspects

of life in a technologically advanced society. But these are systems that are

open to change.

So, to your second question, could there be a cost to this change? – the answer,

of course, in principle could be yes. And the only way to find that out would be

to actually do the studies carefully, gently, and see what happened as a result

of them. But my guess is that what we’ll mostly see when we do those studies

are benefits. And I think this for two reasons. First of all, there’s beginning to

be evidence that as you exploit natural variation in children’s command of

these different core systems, it predicts how well they’ll do in school. So kids

who are better at representing approximate numerosities in a raise of dots also

end up performing better on standardized math tests focusing on symbolic

math at the end of the year. There are three different labs that have found this

quite recently, suggesting that there’s positive relationships between variability

here.

But, second, if there were costs, then what we might expect to see when we

present all of these tasks to, say, all of the children in the arts school or in the

other samples we’ve looked at, is negative relationships between them. The

better you are at geometry, the worse you are at objects or something like that.

We’re not seeing those negative relationships. We’re not seeing strong positive

relationships either. These abilities really seem to be different. But my hunch

from those findings are that we won’t see big costs in other areas if we

promote these. Unless, of course, one did what would be clearly a mistake and

attempt single-mindedly to train children only on one thing, ignoring

everything else.

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SAFIRE: Dr. Wandell, some of us have forgotten the question Dr. McKhann

posed. So will you recap the question with your answer?

WANDELL: Thanks. Be glad to. I remember it well because it’s a big question

about brain science altogether. And it’s a question of how is – how plastic is

the brain, how much can it reorganize? And the elements of the plastic parts,

which are how the connections are formed between the brain – how variable

are those? And are we going to be able to measure them in humans? ‘Cause

most of the work out in the world these days is actually done on mice. So for

somebody like me, who studies reading, a mouse model is not a compelling

approach.

[LAUGHTER]

And so there is, as Dr. McKhann knows well, and I think it must’ve been in his

mind as he was thinking about this, there’s a very large push back these days

from an old neurology position that the brain that you’re born – after you’re

about six or seven years old, congratulations, you got your brain, move on.

[LAUGHTER]

And there’s a big push back against that time set saying that – wow, I’ve got a

book with me now that just says, boy, anything can change. You go, you just

get out there, anything can change. And that’s the push back.

One of the things that’s compelling for us in terms of reading and reading

development is there’s some stuff that that’s pretty much done those large

white matter pathways. The really big ones. They grow when you’re a child.

They’re there. They’re about 10 centimeters and they just don’t change much.

And you can bring somebody back year after year, after year, and it’s just very,

very stable. But the brain is amazing. There are things at 10 centimeters,

there’s also really important stuff that’s about a tenth of a millimeter. So that’s

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basically 100,000 times smaller. And those little guys, the little synapses and

connections, they’re changing regularly. And you can see that at a certain

scale. And those are inaccessible right now to human brain studies. That’s not

something that we’re good at. But it is something that’s really high on my

mind, and that I think there are ways to get at them but it involves a lot of math

and engineering approaches that hasn’t been common.

SAFIRE: Now, we talked a great deal from a scientific point of view about

reading. We have a mystery guest here today, who is not a scientist, who is a

poet. A distinguished poet. Who has done more to encourage reading in

America than anybody I know. The Big Read you may have read about in this

past year, was a function of the National Endowment for the Arts. And we

have with us today someone who can perhaps interpret some of the things that

we have just heard from the point of view of somebody who deeply

understands the power of the arts. So here is Dana Gioia, the Chairman of the

National Endowment for the Arts.

DANA GIOIA: First of all, I want to say that I’m excited and honored to be

here this morning because I think this is an important day – not simply for arts

education in the United States, but for education in general. There’s two

different sets of issues, sets of agenda that are going around today – one is

scientific; the other is an educational political agenda, and that’s really what I

want to talk about. Although I should tell Dr. Spelke that if you wanted to see

this missing negative correlation between people that are good in music and

geometry and terrible at other math, you should see my high school grades.

[LAUGHTER]

And I envy the scientists because they get to work with really cute things like

monkeys and kids, where most of us have to work with politicians, school

boards, and high school principals. And so there’s a different set of issues that

we have to face. And so what I’d like to do is to say from reading simply the

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layman’s summary of the report and hearing your learned expositions today,

some of the issues that I think that it will bring to us in the educational and the

arts community. And I think, first of all, just on a big picture, there’s always

this false opposition of nature versus nurture. Where I think any educator or

any parent knows that it’s nature plus nurture. And that what we really have to

find is what’s the best way of working these things together.

Now, we live in a kind of paradoxical moment in education. Through all

human history there has been a deep assumption that in order to education

children, the arts play a role in the education of children. That this is something

which – I mean, it’s virtually a cultural universal, and I think it comes from the

observation that pleasure is a wonderful entree into knowledge. Now over the

last 30 or 40 years we’ve had a lot of what I would call soft research trying to

find what are mostly sociological, statistical connections between arts learning

and general learning, and this really is based on a kind of traditional anecdotal

observation that people see that these things seem to reinforce each other. We

now have technology, which didn’t exist even ten years ago, which allows us

in a sense to look at these things in some scientific way. And I’m

extraordinarily excited by the first generation of this research.

But moving onto my own area of specialty, it seems to me that there’s at least

four interrelated areas that I think are really important. Now, perhaps from a

scientific viewpoint we do not have definitive answers in these areas, but it

seems to me that the research makes some very powerful suggestions about

things that are really very pressing issues. I mean, even this week I read an

article that I read virtually every week – a major school district in the United

States basically canceled all arts learning so that they can focus on other areas

of study. This strikes me as a recipe for disaster. And I think that the studies

that you’ve done over the last three years suggest some of the reasons.

What I think we’re seeing here is having quantitative scientific data confirm

traditional assumptions about the interrelationships between the ways children

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learn. And this is the first scientific raison d’etre for arts education. I mean,

first is the suggestions of specific links, tight correlations even between arts

learning and other types of learning. Secondly, and I think this is very

important, is the notion that a mix of arts, a mix of types of arts learning is

necessary to realize the different potentials of different children. That there

isn’t simply one type of pedagogy that’s going to have all children realize their

potential. The purpose of education is to realize the full human potential of

each child. Children are differently gifted and so they need a broad range of

these things, and not simply traditional, hard academic subjects, but arts

learning as something that both has an end in itself, which is things like

openness and imagination, creativity.

Which leads to the third, thing, which I think is perhaps the most interesting

sort of intellectually, is the links that you have demonstrated between specific

types of arts learning and specific cognitive functions. Music’s relation to

geometrical thinking and reading fluency; dance’s relationship to observational

learning; theatrical experience, theatre learning to memory and speech. These

are extremely exciting. And I have to say that as someone who studied music,

participated in theater, I saw those sorts of transformations happen around me,

I’ve seen them happen in my children, I’ve seen them happen in kids in

programs that we sponsored. And it’s reassuring to have some objective

validation for that.

But the biggest notion of all is the fourth one. And if we take away – the

educators, the educational policy people, researchers take away anything from

this morning it’s that in the United States today we have created a bogus

opposition between arts learning and other kinds of learning. These decisions

that school boards are making on a local, county, and state level virtually ever

month are based on a faulty model. Because there is a relationship between

what we have traditionally thought of as arts learning and mathematical and

reading learning, analytical learning, I guess for a lack of better words. And I

think this is really the big message.

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Now there’s an enormous amount of research that needs to be done, and it will

probably take centuries before we map it all out. But I think we know enough

today to suggest that the educational policymakers and budget makers in the

country are using a false model. And that it is our obligation – not merely as

professionals in education and in arts learning, but as people who are

committed to the public importance of universal education in a democracy, that

we use an accurate model. A model which emphasizes the interrelationship

between the arts and other forms of studies and brings these necessary

elements of education back into American schools.

So I want to thank Bill Safire and the Dana Foundation for patiently funding

this research. And I thank all of you for I think not simply strengthening

American education, but strengthening education’s fundamental role in our

democracy. So, hats off, guys. Thank you.

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