Habits are not Like Hobbits: They Don't Just Disappear

Even without magic rings, hobbits tend to disappear when one closes a book or turns off the DVD player. They may persist for a short time in the mind, but they tend to fade fairly quickly.

Habits, once formed, tend to stick around -- sometimes for one's entire life. That is one reason why it is important for children to form habits that help them to fulfill their life goals, and form them while they are still quite young.

The following is a list of useful habits that will serve a dangerous child well, at any age:

Habits of Mind PDF

The core of the 16 habits of mind is found in the list above, and brief explanations for them are found in the embedded slideshare below. Those who are acquainted with the concept of frontal lobe "executive function" (EF) will immediately see the similarity between the 16 habits of mind, and strong frontal lobe EF.

Habits of Mind explained for students from Suzie Vesper

Explanations of Habits of Mind

Habits are usually formed unconsciously, and can be very difficult to eradicate if found to be dysfunctional or destructive.

Smart psychologists understand that habits can be displaced, or substituted. Habits are thought to consist of a "cue," a "behaviour," and a "reward." The cue triggers the habitual behaviour, which supplies the reward that feeds the entire cycle.

If the person can disconnect the cue from the dysfunctional behaviour, and re-connect the cue to a more functional and less destructive behaviour which can supply a sufficient reward, the destructive habitual cycle can be displaced or substituted by a more positive habitual cycle.

Even more advanced ways of dealing with habits are being developed in mice, using optogenetics. By interfering with the infralimbic portion of the mouse's prefrontal cortex, researchers were able to break unconscious ingrained habits. But unless the habits were "overwritten" or replaced by new habits, the old habits tended to return.

It is best to learn good habits from the very beginning. That is one reason why many of the most enlightened parents put strict limits on exposure to television, video games, and other popular entertainments, until the child has developed strong habits of self direction and goal fulfillment.

Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind is a book edited by two educators, Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick, found here. An important caveat regarding the book: Like most modern cogs in the machine of modern educational theory, Costa and Kallick appear to be caught up in the "blank slate" delusion of thinking which was refuted so effectively by Steven Pinker, in his book "The Blank Slate." If the reader is able to understand that this underlying philosophical and biological confusion underlies many of the confused ideas which are mixed in with a number of useful ideas about habits of learning, a quick scan of the book can be worthwhile.

Otherwise, a study of prefrontal lobe executive function is likely to be much more satisfying and edifying, if the reader is easily able to apply the ideas to childhood learning and development.

Using Biofeedback to Help Train Your Dangeorus Child

It is not easy to raise a truly dangerous child. Necessary, yes, but not easy. As we learn more about brain development, we are likely to develop better tools to assist us in this difficult work.

Biofeedback is one such tool which is likely to be of great help in dangerous child training, to assist the child in learning to keep a level head.

A new game developed at Boston Children's Hospital... helps children with anger problems to control their temper, so they’ll get along better with other people.

The game, appropriately called RAGE Control, requires the young player to shoot at enemy spaceships while sparing friendly ones. The child’s heart rate is monitored and displayed on the screen, via a sensor attached to one of their fingers. As long as they keep calm and their heart rate stays below a certain threshold, they can keep blasting at the spaceships. If they lose control and their heart rate goes too high, however, they lose the ability to shoot – the only way to regain that ability is to calm back down and lower their heart rate. _Gizmag

Dangerous children are taught a broad range of skills -- including several skills which could be hazardous to the health of the child and those around him, if they are misused. Emotional control is one critical skill which, if mastered, will help to make the mastery of other dangerous skills much safer.

The biofeedback method used in the Boston Children's Hospital game is quite primitive. Heart rate is a couple of levels removed from actual brain function -- which is what we are truly concerned with. A better approach would be to use neurofeedback, which will allow for more precise monitoring and response over a wide range of emotions.

The concept of developmental windows is crucial in the training of emotional control and executive functions. This type of training is best done between the ages of 4 years and 7 years.

Emotional resiliency and emotional mastery are skills which should become intuitive before the child reaches puberty. If the parents neglect this training, they are in for some turbulent years ahead.

Remediation is possible if developmental windows are missed. But only to a limited degree. If you want to save yourselves worlds of trouble in the training of your dangerous children, you will want to act in a timely and well sequenced manner.

Adolescent Psychiatry

Impulsive Violence: Can Brain Implants Affect Poor Impulse Control?

Poor decision making and impulsive behaviour are hallmarks of youth, sociopathy, and the violent criminal.

Interestingly, Parkinson's Disease patients can also exhibit impulsive behaviours -- often as a side affect of treatment. Both drug treatment for Parkinson's and deep brain stimulation (DBS) via implants can increase impulsive and dysfunctional behaviours in Parkinson's patients. Researchers wanted to know why DBS was causing this impulsivity, and what they could do about it.

For their first experiment, the researchers designed a computerized decision-making experiment. They asked 65 healthy subjects and 14 subjects with Parkinson's disease to choose between pairs of generic line art images while their mPFC brain activity was recorded. Each image was each associated with a level of reward. Over time the subjects learned which ones carried a greater reward.

Sometimes, however, the subjects would be confronted with images of almost equal reward -- a relatively tough choice. That's when scalp electrodes detected elevated activity in the mPFC in certain low frequency bands. Lead author and postdoctoral scholar James Cavanagh found that when mPFC activity was larger, healthy participants and Parkinson's participants whose stimulators were off would take proportionally longer to decide. But when deep brain stimulators were turned on to alter STN function, the relationship between mPFC activity and decision making was reversed, leading to decision making that was quicker and less accurate.

The Parkinson's patients whose stimulators were on still showed the same elevated level of activity in the mPFC. The cortex wanted to deliberate, Cavanagh said, but the link to the brakes had been cut.

"Parkinson's patients on DBS had the same signals," he said. "It just didn't relate to behavior. We had knocked out the network."

In the second experiment, the researchers presented eight patients with the same decision-making game while they were on the operating table in Arizona receiving their DBS implant. The researchers used the electrode to record activity directly in the STN and found a pattern of brain activity closely associated with the patterns they observed in the mPFC.

"The STN has greater activity with greater [decision] conflict," he said. "It is responsive to the circumstances that the signals on top of the scalp are responsive to, and in highly similar frequency bands and time ranges."

A mathematical model for analyzing the measurements of accuracy and response time confirmed that the elevated neural activity and the extra time people took to decide was indeed evidence of effortful deliberation.

"It was not that they were waiting without doing anything," said graduate student Thomas Wiecki, the paper's second author. "They were slower because they were taking the time to make a more informed decision. They were processing it more thoroughly."

The results have led the researchers to think that perhaps the different brain regions communicate by virtue of these low-frequency signals. Maybe the impulsivity side effect of DBS could be mitigated if those bands could remain unhindered by the stimulator's signal. Alternatively, Wiecki said, a more sophisticated DBS system could sense that decision conflict is underway in the mPFC and either temporarily suspend its operation until the decision is made, or stimulate the STN in a more dynamic way to better mimic intact STN function. _SD

We know that the prefrontal cortices (PFCs) are crucial to good executive function and impulse control. But it appears from the experiments above that the PFCs need help from other brain centres, such as the sub-thalamic nuclei (STN). Understanding the interaction of the various brain nuclei in the control of complex behaviour and decision-making, can help designers of brain implants and brain stimulators to avoid unfortunate side effects of implant therapy, and to increase positive serendipitous effects of such therapies.

Given the importance of impulse control in the prevention of crime and violence, it is likely that brain stimulators and implants will take on a greater role in the penal system. An interesting historical example of the electrical control of violent behaviour, is the curious instance of Dr. Jose Delgado and the charging bull. Law enforcement officers and correctional officers would like to be able to stop a charging maniac in his tracks, like Delgado did with the bull. It is likely that someday they will have that power.

It would be best if society set about training its youth to possess sound executive function from the earliest age, so as to avoid that type of dystopian future.

Brave New Baby: Genius Training for Infants

Image Source
We have heard of the "better baby" and even the "superbaby." But those approaches to creating the "brave new baby" have been around for a while, and yet, here we are. Still looking for workable ways of training smarter, more cognitively capable children.

University of London researchers have come up with a new approach, beginning with 11 month old infants:

The researchers trained 11-month-old infants to direct their gaze toward images they observed on a computer screen. For example, in one task, a butterfly flew only as long as the babies kept their eyes on it while other distracting elements appeared on screen. Infants visited the lab five times over the course of 15 days. Half of the 42 babies took part in training, while the other half watched TV. Each child was tested for cognitive abilities at the beginning and end of the study.

Trained infants rapidly improved their ability to focus their attention for longer periods and to shift their attention from one point to another. They also showed improvements in their ability to spot patterns and small but significant changes in their spontaneous looking behavior while playing with toys.

"Our results appeared to show an improved ability to alter the frequency of eye movements in response to context," Wass said. "In the real world, sometimes we want to be able to focus on one object of interest and ignore distractions, and sometimes we want to be able to shift the focus of our attention rapidly around a room -- for example, for language learning in social situations. This flexibility in the allocation of attention appeared to improve after training."

The fact that the babies' improvements in concentration transferred to a range of tasks supports the notion that there is greater plasticity in the unspecialized infant brain.

...The findings reported online on Sept. 1 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, are in contrast to reports in adults showing that training at one task generally doesn't translate into improved performance on other, substantially different tasks. _ScienceDaily

Study abstract from Science Direct

This type of research is likely to continue and intensify -- particularly in parts of the world with more authoritarian government control. It is likely to continue because it is quite probable that infant brains can eventually be functionally shaped to approximate a preconceived "ideal." Infant brains are highly plastic, and experience incredibly rapid shaping and re-shaping of local neuronal assemblies and white matter pathways.

Of course there are ethical approaches to this type of research, which should be freely carried out in more open societies. And of course individual parents are free to incorporate elements of such research into their child's overall, well-rounded upbringing. It is likely that there are easily devised "games" which the baby would enjoy playing, which could lead to a faster-thinking, more imaginative child. Perhaps even a child capable of multi-tasking in many ways.

But experimenting parents should beware. The super-baby which you raise may rapidly grow beyond your ability to comprehend and control. Children are essentially amoral creatures who are capable of incredible destruction if given too much power too soon, without superb training in executive function.

It is not wise to train a child in particular areas of genius without incorporating safeguards, executive function training, and ethical training in the overall program. This training should resemble an assortment of games and engaging interactional narratives to the very young child.

At the Al Fin Institute for the Brave New Baby, we are concerned about current trends toward a dumbed-down future. We will share the results of our research into brave new babies as it becomes available.