Eight-month-old Lucas Kronmiller has just had the surface of his largely hairless head fitted with a cap of 128 electrodes. A research assistant in front of him is frantically blowing bubbles to entertain him. But Lucas seems calm and content. He has, after all, come here, to the Infancy Studies Laboratory at Rutgers University, repeatedly since he was just four months old, so today is nothing unusual. He—like more than 1,000 other youngsters over the past 15 years—is helping April A. Benasich and her colleagues to find out whether, even at the earliest age, it is possible to ascertain if a child will go on to experience difficulties in language that will prove a burdensome handicap when first entering elementary school. Benasich is one of a cadre of researchers employing brain-recording techniques to understand the essential processes that underlie learning. The new science of neuroeducation seeks the answers to questions that have always perplexed cognitive psychologists and pedagogues. More Stories | EVER wondered why your child is such a clever clogs? Or would you like to help him or her become better prepared for Big School? Well, research methods of neuroscientists in the United States have started to reveal the basics of what happens in the brain when we learn something new. This means that it may become possible for a Kindy child, prep student or even an infant to engage in simple exercises to ensure that the child is cognitively equipped for school! If ongoing research is successful, reports the latest Scientific American magazine, such interventions could potentially have a huge effect on educational practices by dramatically reducing the incidence of various learning disabilities. Scientists, educators and parents must also beware overstated claims for brain-training methods that purport to help youngsters but have not been proved to work. |
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"[Kasparian] closed the door and Brielle snuggled up to Kyrie and she was just fine," said Jackson. "She calmed right down. It was immediate. It was absolutely immediate." Kasparian put Brielle in the incubator with Kyrie, whom she hadn't seen since birth. To the amazement of everyone, Brielle showed improvement from the first moment she touched her sister. "[Kasparian] closed the door and Brielle snuggled up to Kyrie and she was just fine," said Jackson. "She calmed right down. It was immediate. It was absolutely immediate." Brielle and Kyrie went home with their family just before Christmas, when they were only two months old. When they left the hospital, they each weighed well over five pounds and were considered healthy. "They're doing fantastic," Heidi said. People learned about Brielle and Kyrie when a beautiful photograph of Kyrie's arm protectively around her sister, known as the "Rescuing Hug" picture, was published in Reader's Digest and Lifemagazine in 1996. People were deeply touched by the expression of love between the two tiny sisters and inspired by the healing that can happen with just the warmth of another person. The conventional thinking of doctors at that time was that tiny preemies should be kept apart so infections couldn't spread. But experts now believe that the threat of infection is minimal, and the benefits of the comfort and security gained by the presence of the baby's twin far outweigh any risks. "When you consider what these babies have already experienced,being thrust too early out of the soothing environment of the womb and into the noise, glare and physical discomfort of life in the hospital, you wonder what added stress is caused by being separated for the first time from the comfort of the other baby," wrote Patricia Maxwell Malmstrom and Janet Poland in The Art of Parenting Twins. "There is considerable evidence that multiple infants who are co-bedded handle the stress of being hospitalized, and of all the procedures they must endure, better than those who are separated." Successes in cases such as Brielle and Kyrie's have led to many more hospitals adopting the practice of co-bedding. Children's Hospital in Columbia, Missouri, first began co-bedding in 1998 when the parents of twins Meagan and Jacob Breid asked that they be placed together. Medical staff at the hospital agreed after reading studies from other hospitals in this country and around the world. More Stories
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