Does Our Brain Have a Switch that Makes Everyone an Einstein?

I subscribe to a free newsletter from the Dana Foundation (http://www.dana.org/). It's called Brain in the News. There's a great variety of interesting articles on current brain research each month - like It's Never Too Late to Grow Your Brain, The Sounds of Shapes Allows Blind People to 'See' Again - you get the idea. The articles are based on scientific research reports and represent a compilation of published research from well-known sources.

The essence of the Title article is questioning whether keeping our minds active can increase problem solving skills.

As teachers and administrators in public schools, we are all looking for the quick fix, silver bullet, stun gun approach to leaving no child left behind. I was particularly drawn to the idea that "challenging your brain can have positive effects." "Brain plasticity" is a big topic among computer software companies (like FastForword - http://www.scilearn.com/) which claim to "strengthen brain processing efficiency for learning and reading success." (Be sure to read carefully through their list of references.)

However, the truth according to other researchers (Cohen, Andreasen, Beeman) is that "extravagant claims about ways of improving your brain on the basis of evidence from MRI machines are likely to be snake oil." So, to those of you thinking we can just press the Easy Button, sorry...it still takes good teaching and good teachers.

The article continues to discuss What Makes Genius? I love the idea that we can all have those moments of inspriation or insight - but "we don't really know what we are seeing when we watch the brain work (on the MRI)...It may be 300 years before we can do things like enhance our creativity...some say in 20 years we can make you smarter, but I'm a pessimist." And I could be dead by then!

The article ends with "There's going to be a lot of snake oil on the market in the decades, if not centuries, before we can come up with any more solid prescriptions to save our highest creative selves from brain rot." So in the meantime...let's work on our teaching skills and help the children that are struggling to read.

Postscript: test your brain out at http://www.brainmetrix.com/ or go to http://www.sharpbrains.com/ to get "high-quality, research based information and guidance to navigate the brain-training and cognitive-fitness market." Or, better still, read a good book!