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June 12, 2008Building buff brains: Remedial instruction can close gap between good, poor readers |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: Just as a disciplined exercise regimen helps human muscles become stronger and perform better, specialized workouts for the brain can boost cognitive skills, according to Carnegie Mellon scientists. Their new brain imaging study of poor readers found that 100 hours of remedial instruction --- reading calisthenics, of sorts, aimed to shore up problem areas --- not only improved the skills of struggling readers, but also changed the way their brains activated when they comprehended written sentences. Carnegie Mellon researchers say poor readers initially have less activation in the parietotemporal area of the brain, which is the region responsible for decoding the sounds of written language and assembling them into words and phrases that make up a sentence, than do good readers. However, remedial instruction increases the struggling readers' activation to near normal levels. "This study demonstrates how the plasticity of the human brain can work for the benefit of remedial learning," says neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI), and senior author of the new study currently available on the Web site of the journal Neuropsychologia. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), CCBI Research Fellows Ann Meyler and Tim Keller measured blood flow to all of the different parts of the brain while children were reading and found that that the parietotemporal areas were significantly less activated among the poor readers than in the control group. There is a persistent but incorrect belief that dyslexia is primarily caused by difficulties in the visual perception of letters, leading to confusions between letters like "p" and "d".
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