Brain Rewiring

[Guest guest]

Thought this was awesome, and is results we are seeing from work with Jay.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all. Eileen xxxx

Carnegie Mellon Scientists Discover First Evidence of Brain Rewiring in Children

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Study Shows Reading Remediation Improves Children's Reading Skills and

Positively Alters Brain Tissue

Carnegie Mellon University scientists Keller and Marcel Just have

uncovered the first evidence that intensive instruction to improve reading

skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself, creating

new white matter that improves communication within the brain.

" Showing that it's possible to rewire a brain's white matter has important

implications for treating reading disabilities and other developmental

disorders, including autism, " said Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology

and director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI).

As the researchers recently reported in the journal Neuron, brain imaging of

children between the ages of 8 and 10 showed that the quality of white

matter—the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of grey matter, where

information is processed—improved substantially after the children received 100

hours of remedial training. After the training, imaging indicated that the

capability of the white matter to transmit signals efficiently had increased,

and testing showed the children could read better.

Keller and Just's study was designed to discover what physically changes in the

brains of poor readers who make the transition to good reading. They scanned the

brains of 72 children before and after they went through a six-month remedial

instruction program. Using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a new brain imaging

technique that tracks water movement in order to reveal the microscopic

structure of white matter, Keller and Just found a brain change involving the

white matter cabling that wires different parts of the brain together.

" Water molecules that are inside nerve fibers tend to move or diffuse parallel

to the nerve fibers, " explained Keller, a CCBI research scientist and author of

the first developmental study of compromised white matter in autism. " To track

the nerve fibers, the scanner senses areas in which many water molecules are

moving along in the same direction and produces a road-map of the brain's

wiring. "

Previous DTI studies had shown that both children and adults with reading

difficulty displayed areas of compromised white matter. This new study shows

that 100 hours of intensive reading instruction improved children's reading

skills and also increased the quality of the compromised white matter to normal

levels. More precisely, the DTI imaging illustrated that the consistency of

water diffusion had increased in this region, indicating an improvement in the

integrity of the white matter tracts.

" The improved integrity essentially increases communication bandwidth between

the two brain areas that the white matter connects, by a factor of 10, " Just

said. " This opens a new era of being able to see the brain wiring change when an

effective instructional treatment is applied. It lets us see educational

interventions from a new perspective. "

Out of the 72 children, 47 were poor readers and 25 were reading at a normal

level. The good readers and a group of 12 poor readers did not receive the

remedial instruction, and their brain scans did not show any changes. " The lack

of change in the control groups demonstrates that the change in the treated

group cannot be attributed to naturally occurring maturation during the study, "

Keller said.

Keller and Just also found that the amount of change in diffusion among the

treated group was directly related to the amount of increase in phonological

decoding ability. The children who showed the most white matter change also

showed the most improvement in reading ability, confirming the link between the

brain tissue alteration and reading progress.