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Brains are in the news today
By JON HOORNSTRA
The impeccably dressed woman took her place at the podium to deliver the keynote address. More than 3,000 professionals sat in front of her as she deftly focused their attention on her topic, the human brain.
The speaker was Dr. Marian Diamond, a professor of anatomy at UC Berkeley, an expert on the human brain and co-author of Magic Trees of the Mind.
Diamond produced a pair of long rubber gloves and, one arm at a time, pulled them onto her hands, flexing and snapping the fingers until they fit snugly. Then, up and over the wrists.
Finally, she was as ready as any surgeon or county coroner. She again reached down and lifted an item from a bucket. As formaldehyde dripped over her gloved hands, the crowd gasped in instant recognition that she held a human brain.
"Think about this," she began. "I am holding in one hand a human brain whose nerve cells have the ability to conceive of a universe a billion light years or more across."
She continued, "During fetal development alone, 50,000 nerve cells are produced every second." That is followed by even more robust growth immediately after birth with the onset of outside stimuli, she said.
The professor and her brain specimen appeared at the annual meeting of early childhood educators, sponsored by the California Kindergarten Association at San Francisco State University on Jan. 13. Diamond, a pioneer in the study of human brain development, was an ideal speaker for the group, which included a delegation from the Cupertino elementary school system.
"The more activity in an infant's life, the more nerve cell branches that develop," she said. "And the more nerve cell branches, the more thinking and learning that can occur."
Maps of fetal and infant brains reveal sparse tree-like formations of neurons with few branches. But those "trees" grow rapidly and look like dense forests as early as age two.
To illustrate fully the needs and demands of the human brain, Diamond said the body produces 2.5 million red blood cells every second, and the brain gets fully one-fourth of the blood produced.
But the professor had a note of caution for teachers and parents alike: It is possible to overwhelm the brain. She recalled experiments with rats in plain, spartan cages equipped only with food and water, compared to other cages made gradually more complex with barriers and filled with obstacles to climb.
"When the objects in the complex cage were changed once a week, the rats readily adapted and thrived," she said. "But if we changed the objects three times a night for four weeks, the rats were overwhelmed. Unable to cope, they retreated to a corner of the cage."
"With too much stimulation, the human brain does not respond positively as it does with a less overwhelming environment," she said.
"Likewise," she concluded, "if we understimulate the brains of either rats or humans, then they can deteriorate."
There was another recent development in brain research aimed at adults who routinely berate and yell at kids as discipline. The study, authored by Dr. Max Teicher and published last month in the journal Cerebrum, said the evidence is compelling that verbal abuse of children can be as destructive as physical or sexual abuse.
"We are finding that verbal abuse is devastating to children," Teicher told the Boston Globe. "Such abuse can actually alter the physical shape of the brain," he said.
Some things to think about, assuming your brain wasn't bent too much out of shape years ago.
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
