Dyslexia: Is it time to rethink or examine the diagnosis?

Some years ago, a student informed me that she was encountering a problem with my classes.

When asked to explain a little further, she told me that she had been diagnosed as dyslexic.

I asked if she could be a little more specific about the particular difficulties she was encountering.

Responding, “I can’t understand what you are talking about”, she explained that the ideas I was expressing were complex and she found them difficult to grasp.

I enquired how I might help her with this problem. She replied that she would welcome a single sheet of A4 for each lecture containing a set of bullet points that summarised the key points.

This anecdote exemplifies some of the confusion that surrounds “dyslexia”, a term used to describe a variety of problems. Researchers tend to describe as dyslexic all those who struggle to decode text.

Others, often clinicians, argue that only some poor decoders are dyslexic. Still others contend that decoding difficulty is but one part of a much broader dyslexic condition.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that diagnosis is deemed to be highly subjective and lacking in scientific rigour. 

While special tests and symptom profiles are commonly used, there is no means of making a consistent and meaningful judgement.

As the list of so-called signs and symptoms is lengthy, most people reporting reading difficulties will demonstrate some of them.

Many such symptoms are found in good readers, and those diagnosed as dyslexic often differ substantially from one another.

Many clinicians still employ IQ tests as a basis for diagnosis, even though this practice has been discreditted and no longer has any scientific support.

Meanwhile, research studies in neuroscience and genetics, often used by proponents to justify the dyslexia construct, are typically conducted with poor decoders (not a so-called dyslexic subgroup), and currently offer no additional diagnostic information.

The key problem is that dyslexia diagnoses have moved far away from their original focus (severe reading difficulty) to incorporate an ever-increasing range of cognitive and self-regulatory deficits including poor working memory, processing speed limitations, attention/concentration problems, difficulties in analysing and synthesising complex information, and in organising and expressing ideas.

For any students who struggle to cope with academic demands for such reasons, there are obvious equity issues within our highly competitive higher education sector between those who are diagnosed dyslexic and those who are not and, instead, are considered to be academically weaker performers.

Read the full article here

Research Team first to Map Autism-Risk Genes by Function

Pity the poor autism researcher. Recent studies have linked hundreds of gene mutations scattered throughout the brain to increased autism risk. Where do you start?

UCLA neuroscientists may have an answer. They are the first to map groups of autism-risk genes by function, and to identify where and when these genes normally play major roles in early brain development.

In addition, they discovered disturbances in neural circuits that define key pathways between parts of the cerebral cortex.

The research suggests that these early disruptions are created by mutations in genes during fetal brain development and are not a result of autism itself.

Published in the Nov. 21 edition of Cell, the findings will help scientists understand how genetic changes cause autism on a molecular level and prioritize targets for future studies.

"Identifying gene variants that boost risk is only the first step of unraveling a disease," explained lead author Dr. Daniel Geschwind, the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics, professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour.

"We need to figure out where genetic changes appear in the brain, at what stages during development and which biological processes they disrupt. Only then will we understand how mutations cause autism."

Using an online atlas called BrainSpan, the authors charted gene activity in the developing brain before birth.

In particular, they examined what happens during gene expression —when genes copy data from DNA to RNA in order to create proteins.

Geschwind and his colleagues found high activity in risk genes during two processes critical to early brain development.

"We found that gene variants are expressed in the developing brain when cells define their future identities and roles in neural circuits," first author Neelroop Parikshak, a graduate student researcher in Geschwind's lab.

"Therefore, changes in the genes influence the brain's wiring by altering the synapse and shaping how neurons transmit signals to each other."

The mutated genes also interfered with how the brain's layers and halves relate to one another, a phenomenon confirmed by previous imaging studies of the autistic brain.

"We discovered gene-related disruption of circuits that connect the autistic brain's layers and hemispheres to each other," explained Geschwind, who is director of the UCLA Neurogenetics Program and the Center for Autism Research and Treatment and co-director of the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics at UCLA.

 "Our finding suggests that the mutated genes caused the miswiring; it's not a result of having the disease itself."

The UCLA team also demonstrated that while autism and intellectual disability share similar risk genes, the genes behave uniquely, showing for the first time how the two disorders differ.

"People often lump intellectual disability together with autism, because the disorders' risk genes overlap," said Parikshak.

"We showed that these genes have unique expression patterns in different brain regions at varying times during brain development.

"Genes linked to intellectual disability influence many biological processes in the body," he added. "But genes tied to autism tend to affect specific functions, such as the connections between brain regions that are essential to many human-specific behaviours, like speech and language."

The UCLA study will reap immediate benefits in the near future, when neuroscientists sequence the genomes of several thousand people for genetic mutations linked to autism and intellectual disability.

"We've made our analysis publically available to allow other researchers to expand upon our study and explore the data in detail," said Geschwind.

"We believe this will mark an important step forward in understanding the biology behind autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders."

Mental illness and Intelligence tied to ancient accident

Scientists have discovered for the first time how humans – and other mammals – have evolved to have intelligence.

Researchers have identified the moment in history when the genes that enabled us to think and reason evolved.

This point 500 million years ago provided our ability to learn complex skills, analyse situations and have flexibility in the way in which we think.

Professor Seth Grant, of the University of Edinburgh, who led the research, said: “One of the greatest scientific problems is to explain how intelligence and complex behaviours arose during evolution.”

The research, which is detailed in two papers in Nature Neuroscience, also shows a direct link between the evolution of behaviour and the origins of brain diseases.

Scientists believe that the same genes that improved our mental capacity are also responsible for a number of brain disorders.

“This ground breaking work has implications for how we understand the emergence of psychiatric disorders and will offer new avenues for the development of new treatments,” said John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, one of the study funders.

Genetic accidents will happen

The study shows that intelligence in humans developed as the result of an increase in the number of brain genes in our evolutionary ancestors.

The researchers suggest that a simple invertebrate animal living in the sea 500 million years ago experienced a ‘genetic accident’, which resulted in extra copies of these genes being made.

This animal’s descendants benefited from these extra genes, leading to behaviourally sophisticated vertebrates – including humans.

The research team studied the mental abilities of mice and humans, using comparative tasks that involved identifying objects on touch-screen computers.

Researchers then combined results of these behavioural tests with information from the genetic codes of various species to work out when different behaviours evolved.

Mental illness connection

They found that higher mental functions in humans and mice were controlled by the same genes.

The study also showed that when these genes were mutated or damaged, they impaired higher mental functions.

“Our work shows that the price of higher intelligence and more complex behaviours is more mental illness,” said Professor Grant.

The researchers had previously shown that more than 100 childhood and adult brain diseases are caused by gene mutations.

“We can now apply genetics and behavioural testing to help patients with these diseases”, said Dr Tim Bussey from Cambridge University, which was also involved in the study.

The Importance of Practice and Sleep for Musicians - Molly Gebrian

Musicians v. Non-Musicians - Molly Gebrian

Most of studies on changes in neuronal activity only last a week or two at the most. 

It’s not logistically feasible to have people coming into the lab for weeks or months on end to have their brains looked at, so, some neuro-scientists think musicians are an ideal population to find out what happens when you practice a motor task repeatedly for years and years.

One of the most obvious changes is that, especially in string players and keyboard players, the portion of the motor cortex devoted to the fingers is much bigger.

At the same time, the neurons in this cortical network are much more efficient.

These two things happen because, presumably, over time, lots and lots of neurons get connected by synapses that wouldn’t normally be connected, and the neuronal ensembles that result from these new connections get much better at what they do because they get to practice everyday.

A musician’s brain is so efficient at things like scales and other simple patterns that are automatic to us that entire brain areas don’t get engaged in a musician’s brain that are very active in a non-musician or amateur’s brain.

Two of these areas are the pre-motor cortex and the supplementary motor area.

These are involved in planning complex movements and coordinating timing, but when musicians play scales or simple rhythm patterns, these areas barely do anything at all.

The only other complex motor tasks that show this lack of activation are overlearned skills such as writing.

What this means is that our basic set of tools and skills as musicians are so automatic that our brain barely has to do anything to execute them.

But what this also means is that when you learn a new skill, especially something like the extended techniques used in contemporary music, there is a necessary period of days or weeks that your brain needs to rewire itself and for new neuronal ensembles and circuits to form.

The other amazing thing that happens in musicians’ brains, as new synapses form, is that our motor cortex gets connected to our auditory cortex.

Think about how strange that is. For most people, what they hear doesn’t cause them to have automatic associations with movement, and moving certainly doesn’t cause them to hear things in their heads.

But if a musician listens to a recording of a piece they know and play well, not only does their auditory cortex light up on a brain scan (fMRI), but the portion of their motor cortex devoted to their fingers does too.

Furthermore, neuroscientists have shown that the motor cortex isn’t just lighting up as a whole unit – the areas that control the individual fingers light up in the order and timing they would to execute the correct fingering (Bangert and Altenmuller, 2003).

NB: When these kinds of studies are done, measures are taken to make sure the musicians aren’t physically moving their fingers.

The opposite happens too: if you tell a pianist to play a piece silently on a tabletop, their auditory cortex lights up as it would if they were actually playing (and hearing) the piece.

These finding just serve to highlight how important it is to always keep singing in your head as you play and to be really clear about what you want to hear.

It affects what comes out of your fingers and arms and mouth, not in some strange metaphysical way, but because your auditory cortex is connected to your motor cortex.

If you aren’t clear on what you want to hear, the auditory cortex has a very limited message to send to your fingers.

The Role of Sleep in Learning

If all of these changes have to take place in your brain before you can play something fluidly and competently, is there anything you can do to speed up the process?

The answer depends on how much you want to speed it up, because it turns out that a very important component of motor (and auditory) learning is sleep.

Matthew Walker and his colleagues here in Boston have done a number of experiments on motor learning during sleep (Walker, et al, 2002, 2003, 2005).

Their basic experimental paradigm involves three groups of people. The first group gets taught a finger tapping task (4-1-2-3-4 where 4 is the pinky finger and 1 is the index finger) at 10am, which they then practice and are tested on multiple times throughout the day.

The second group gets taught and practices the same task at 10am, but they don’t get tested on it again until 10pm.

Then, they are sent home to sleep and tested the next morning at 10am. The final group is trained on the task at 10pm and has their first retest at 10am the next morning. What they found is astonishing.

The first group gets gradually better throughout the day at a rate that you can predict.

The second group shows the same linear increase during the day, but when you test them the next morning, there is a huge jump in their performance (measured by faster sequence execution without loss of accuracy).

The same goes for the group that was trained at 10pm and then retested for the first time the next day – they got much better overnight, even though all they were doing was sleeping!

NB: Everyone was instructed not to practice when they went home.

Even more surprising, there is absolutely no relationship between how much better a person got during daytime practicing and how much better they got after sleeping.

How is this possible and what does it mean? Researchers have concluded that the last result means that practice-dependent learning and sleep-dependent learning are independent processes.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that if you don’t practice, you’ll get better just by sleeping but it does mean that you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of sleep in learning, especially when it’s brand new.

Knowing this can help you use your practice time much more efficiently.

Say, for instance, you have a lot of music to learn for orchestra and not a lot of time to practice it.

You will be much better off practicing your orchestra music for 15 minutes a day until the concert, rather than “wood-shedding” the day before the concert.

Why? Because you’ll have all those nights of sleep for your brain to process the new music. So ultimately, you’ll be able to play the music better with fewer hours of actual practice.

When you’re learning a new piece that you have ample time to practice, keeping the role of sleep in mind can also help you practice more efficiently.

The primary thing that improved with sleep for the people in these studies was speed (at least that’s what the experimenters were measuring).

Since the amount of daytime improvement and learning after sleep aren’t related, spending hours and hours on a really tricky fast passage on the first few days of practicing isn’t as efficient as getting it fluent at a slower tempo and then just leaving it until the next day.

The next day, not only will you be able to play it faster, but you’ll spend much less time getting it to a faster tempo than you would’ve the day before.

No one probably would’ve guessed that just sleeping would make you better at playing your instrument, but researchers have shown that it does, over and over again.

The effects of sleep are really hard to study, but in this case, researchers think they know how it works.

Sleep is divided into two broad types: REM sleep and non-REM sleep (or NREM sleep). REM sleep is when you have dreams.

During what is called Stage 2 NREM sleep, however, electrical brain events occur that are called sleep spindles.

During a sleep spindle, there is a huge burst of electrical activity in a population of neurons that causes massive amounts of calcium to enter those cells.

Calcium is what causes all the changes discussed earlier, from strengthening and weakening synapses, to making new synapses, to synchronizing the firing of neuronal ensembles.

Sleep spindles reach peak intensity late in the night and have been shown to increase following motor learning during the day.

The study by Matthew Walker and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School also found that the percentage of improvement after sleeping strongly correlated with the amount of time the person spent in Stage 2 NREM sleep in the final quarter of the night, precisely when sleep spindle activity is at its peak.

This finding also highlights the importance of getting enough sleep while you’re learning something new.

A full night of sleep was defined as 8 hours in this study, and it was only the last two hours that were really important for learning.

Getting a full night’s sleep may be even more important that we realize.

Read the full article here: http://madisonjazz.files.wordpress.com/

A Profile of Paula Tallal Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience

A Profile of Paula Tallal, Co-Director, Center for Molecular and Behavioural Neuroscience & Professor II. Her Faculty is the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience

Correcting Language Problems Through Neuroplasticity

Similar to a traveler who unknowingly sets out on the wrong route and needs to be redirected, the brain's plasticity can be utilized to guide the development of neural networks to correct language learning problems.

That key finding and insights into the brain's auditory processing system by Paula Tallal, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, has helped to bring positive change to hundreds of thousands of children worldwide who struggle with language.

With her co-researchers, Tallal helped to devise a revolutionary technique and software program - Fast ForWord - to assist children with establishing and strengthening the neural networks for language development.

For more than 30 years, Tallal, co-director of the Rutgers Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, has been studying the connections between auditory processing, attention, memory and language learning.

What her research has shown is that timing is critically important for learning language and speech. The central problem for many children who struggle with language, including those with dyslexia, is that their brains have difficulty perceiving rapidly successive acoustic changes, such as the difference between "da" and "ba."

Tallal and her co-researchers hypothesized that the brain's neuroplasticity could be used to rewire neural networks to increase that processing speed or to "fire and wire" as she describes it. 

Neuroplasticity refers to the fact that the brain, rather than being molded and set, is able to reorganize itself in response to new situations or changes in the environment.

In 1996, she and co-researcher Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus, University of California, San Francisco, founded Scientific Leaning Corporation to bring their research out of the lab to help children who struggle with language.

The result was Fast ForWord, a computer-based program that corrects auditory processing problems by pushing the brain to handle auditory information at faster and faster speeds. The software, with an 80 percent success rate, has been used by children in more than 40 countries.

In her research, Tallal found that many children who struggle with language have a listening "window" that is slower than 1/4 second long.

Yet to differentiate fast-changing sounds, the brain needs to be able to perceive differences at the millisecond range to learn the smaller sounds inside of words, the phonemes.

If auditory information could be slowed down, Tallal theorized, it should become easier for children with processing delays to learn those differences.

That instead of mistaking "cat" for "tat," for example, they could learn to hear the discrete changes and if that information then could be presented at increasingly faster rates, their brains could be remodeled to make learning language easier and permanent.

That is just what Fast ForWord and the team's related learning tools accomplish. As shown by fMRI studies, the brains of children who have used the program develop the same firing patterns as children who do not struggle with language.

Her current research is focused on the neural and genetic bases of language development, and early detection methods for language learning difficulties.

In research that followed a set of babies across several years, she and her team found that identifying how fast the brain can organize simple incoming auditory information at very young ages is the best predictor of successful language development.

Such findings could open the way for earlier correction methods to spare children the struggles so many experience because of processing delays.

BishopBlog: Neuroscientific interventions for dyslexia: red flags

Views about interventions for dyslexia and related disorders. In recent years there has been a proliferation of interventions offered on the web, many of which claim to treat the brain basis of dyslexia.

In theory, this seems a great idea; rather than slogging away at teaching children to read, fix the underlying brain problem. If your child is struggling at school, it can be very tempting to try something that claims to re-organise or stimulate the brain.

The problem, though, is sorting the wheat from the chaff. There's no regulation of educational interventions and it can be hard for parents to judge whether it is worth investing time and money in a new approach.

The aim here is to provide some objective criteria that can be used.

First, there is scientific evaluation: does the intervention have a plausible basis, and how has it been tested? Where claims are made about changing the brain, are they based on solid neuroscientific research?

Second, there are red flags, some of which are listed in a previous post on ‘Pioneering treatment or quackery?” Here I've gathered these together so that there is a ready checklist that can be applied when a new intervention surfaces.

Read more: BishopBlog: Neuroscientific interventions for dyslexia: red flags

How Children Learn to Read - Book Review

This book brings together in one volume information about the neurobiological, genetic, and behavioral bases of reading and reading disabilities.

In recent years, research on assessment and treatment of reading disability (dyslexia) has become a magnet for the application of new techniques and technologies from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

This interdisciplinary fusion has yielded numerous and diverse findings regarding the brain basis of this syndrome, which are discussed in this volume by leading researchers.

Intervention approaches based on such research are presented. The book also calls for research in specific directions, to encourage the field to continue moving into the bold frontier of how the brain reads.

The volume is essential reading for a range of researchers, clinicians, and other professionals interested in reading and reading disability, and also commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Extraordinary Brain Conferences hosted by The Dyslexia Foundation.

Table of Contents

W. Baker, Preface. P. McCardle, N. Landi, K. Pugh, Introduction.


Section 1. Major Themes in the Study of the Neurobiology of Dyslexia. S. Frost, R. Sandak, W.E. Mencl, N. Landi, J.G. Rueckl, L. Katz, K. Pugh, Mapping the Word Reading Circuitry in Skilled and Disabled Readers. G. Rosen, Y. Wang, C.G. Fiondella, J.J. Lo Turco, The Brain and Developmental Dyslexia: Genes, Anatomy, and Behavior. G. Sherman, C. Cowen, From Research Lab to School Front Lines: Talents and Dilemmas in Children with Learning Differences.


Section 2. Methods and Tools. D. Francis, Methodological Advances in Developmental Research. E. Mencl, S. Frost, K. Pugh, Tools for Multimodal Imaging. J. Rueckl, M. Seidenberg, Computational Modeling and the Neural Bases of Reading and Reading Disorders. E. Grigorenko, A.J. Naples, The Devil is in the Details: Decoding the Genetics of Reading.


Section 3. Neurobiological, Genetic, and Cognitive Aspects. F. Ramus, G. Szenkovits, Understanding the Nature of the Phonological Deficit. P. Cornelissen, Visual Word Recognition: Insights from MEG and Implications for Developmental Dyslexia. L.E. Cutting, S.H. Eason, K. Young, A.L. Alberstadt, Reading Comprehension: Cognition and Neuroimaging. R. Olson, B. Byrne, S. Samuelsson, Reconciling Strong Genetic and Strong Environmental Influences on Individual Differences and Deficits in Reading Ability. R. Frost, Reading in Hebrew vs. Reading in English: Is there a Qualitative Difference?


Section 4. Intervention. B. Foorman, S. Al Otaiba, Reading Remediation: State of the Art. L. Siegel, Remediation of Reading Difficulties in English Language Learning Students. M. Wolf, S. Gottwald, W. Galante, E. Norton, L. Miller, How the Origins of Reading Instruct our Knowledge of Reading Development and its Intervention. P. McCardle, K. Pugh, Integration of Methodologies in Cognitive Neuroscience: Research Planning and Policy.

Reviews

"This volume is a valuable contribution to our growing understanding of the biological and cognitive bases of dyslexia. We believe that researchers in neuroscience, genetics, and cognitive science will find useful summaries of current research in these areas. 

Reading instructors looking for current research that is relevant to the development of intervention programs will find the volume challenging but rewarding." – David W. Carroll and Debora P. Carroll in PsycCRITIQUES

Dyscalculia: Recognising Consciousness

Students who struggle to learn mathematics may have a neurocognitive disorder that inhibits the acquisition of basic numerical and arithmetic concepts, according to a new paper.

Specialised teaching for individuals with dyscalculia, the mathematical equivalent of dyslexia, should be made widely available in mainstream education, according to a review of current research published in the journal Science.

Dyscalculia Search Results from Science Journal

Although just as common as dyslexia, with an estimated prevalence of up to 7% of the population, dyscalculia has been neglected as a disorder of cognitive development.

However, a world-wide effort by scientists and educators has established the essential neural network that supports arithmetic, and revealed abnormalities in this network in the brains of dyscalulic learners.

Neuroscience research shows what kind of help is most needed, strengthening simple number concepts.

This can be achieved with appropriate specially-designed teaching schemes, which can be supported by game-like software that adapts to the learner’s current level of competence.

Prof Brian Butterworth Profile at UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience

Professor Brian Butterworth, co-author of the paper and a member of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience (CEN) from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “Dyscalculia is at least as much of a handicap for individuals as dyslexia and a very heavy burden on the state, with the estimated cost to the UK of low numeracy standing at £2.4 billion.”

Prof Brian Butterworth's website; The Mathematical Brain

“Nevertheless, there are only cursory references to the disorder on the Department of Education website, no indications are offered for help either for learners, teachers or parents. It’s as if the government does not want to acknowledge its existence.”

Like dyslexia, dyscalculia is a condition we are born with, and may be heritable in many or most cases. Research from twins and special populations suggests that an arithmetical disability has a large genetic component, but the genes responsible have not yet been located.

Research Claims No link between dyslexia and lack of musical ability

No link between dyslexia and lack of musical ability

There is no link between a lack of musical ability and dyslexia. Moreover, attempts to treat dyslexia with music therapy are unwarranted, according to scientists in Belgium writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Arts and Technology.

Cognitive neuroscientist Jos- Morais of the Free University of Brussels and colleagues point out that research into dyslexia has pointed to a problem with how the brain processes sounds and how dyslexic readers manipulate the sounds from which words are composed, the phonemes, consciously and intentionally.

It was a relatively short step between the notion that dyslexia is an issue of phonological processing and how this might also be associated with poor musical skills - amusia - that has led to approaches to treating the condition using therapy to improve a dyslexic reader's musical skills.

Morais and colleagues demonstrate that theoretically this is an invalid argument and also present experimental evidence to show that there is no justification either for the link or for using music therapy to treat dyslexia.

Language and music are apparently uniquely human traits and many researchers have tried to find direct links between the two. A whole industry of music therapy hinges on this purported association with claims that language remediation is possible through the application of learning in music.

Given the social importance of literacy, a role for music in helping poor or dyslexic readers to overcome their difficulties has been at the forefront of therapy for many years. Morais' team points out that the notion is based on studies that are generally flawed in two respects.

The first problem with studies that attempt to link a lack of musical ability with reading difficulties is that the quality of published empirical studies is quite variable and many reviews of the field fail to discard papers containing insufficient information, either on materials and methods, or on the experimental results.

The second flaw is that many studies imply an explicit causality between amusia and dyslexia on the basis of results that are themselves merely statistical correlations.

Such an approach to science leads to a circular argument in which some researchers argue that music discrimination predicts phonological skills, which in turn predicts reading ability and that reading ability implies phonological skills and so on.

More recent studies have broken the link between hearing and reading by showing that deaf children, who often learn to perceive speech accurately using lip reading and visual clues can have literacy levels just as high as hearing children.

Of course, most of those children do not develop good musical ability with respect to musical pitch. Conversely, people who are unable even to hum a familiar tune show normal literacy levels.

Music and speech do overlap, but musical sounds and phonemes are not the same, the researchers explain. Musical tones are simply sounds, however, they are produced and can be heard without recourse to complex auditory analysis.

Phonemes, in contrast, whether spoken or read, are abstractions of the units into which language might be broken down. They are purely symbolic and require significantly more interpretation to understand than simply hearing a sound.

Studying Young Minds, to Learn How to Teach Them

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

But recent research has turned that assumption on its head. A number of other so called, conventional wisdom, has also been overturned; geometry, reading, language and self-control in class.

The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.

In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most preschoolers could perform rudimentary arithmetic, by using a practical example; distributing candies among two or three play animals.

In another study, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11. This is much later than many have previously assumed.

The teaching of basic academic skills has up until now been largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, but it is finally giving way to approaches based on cognitive science.

In several US cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain function scientists, to help children overcome dyslexia.

In addition, schools in about a dozen US states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, in an effort to improve concentration and self-control in class.

“Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.”

This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. Fortunately, there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record.

If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up — giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.