Building a Better Brain

Posted on February 28th, 2010 in Blog by warren

Today in my Level 2 class we were doing timed exercises striving to get a gold star.   In a three minute period one student delivers a cue in English and the partner translates it into Spanish.  There are 40 cues and they all have to be translated in three minutes.  When I do this exercises, even though I know the answers perfectly, I find my mind starting to melt down after about 25 cues.  I have to stay focused and the three minutes seems like a half hour.  It is intense and requires a strong brain to get a gold star in this exercise.

What amazes me is the number of people that can do this successfully who are between 60 and 70 years old.  Who are these people?  They are my students, people who are engaged in life long learning, people who are reinventing themselves right before my eyes.

These folks have completely changed their paradigm of reality.  They have moved to a foreign country and are learning a new language.  They are actually building a better brain.

On page 67 in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge, Doidge says, “Learning a new language in old age is so good for improving memory generally. Because it requires intense focus. Studying a new language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds.“

The experience of learning a new language and creating new memories using is is one of the best ways to build a better brain and a more youthful life.

A language is a mind made up of patterns called sentences. The mind map of these patterns are what create the neuron connections in the brain.  Your mother language is a mind map and the longer you speak it, the more rigid it becomes. 

Doidge says that “unlearning” the mother tongue map we have in our brains is an important first step. The longer, more eloquently we speak our native language in old age the more stubbornly we cling to those maps.

Learning Spanish creates plasticity and stops rigidity by building new brain maps. The brain is plastic and the more plasticity the better the brain. 

The Warren Hardy Method was designed to build a better brain.  Over the 40 years of working with adult learners I have developed a method that takes into consideration the learning modalities of older brains. Here is why it works:

The “cross-training methodology” develops both an understanding of sentence structure and the ability to speak and understand at the same time.

It builds power of focus because you are engaged in a different activity almost every three minutes.

Repletion is spaced and there is plenty of it.

There are filling the blank/self grading workbooks with plenty of exercises and flashcards that develop visual links in the brain.  Finally, these materials are carefully integrated with audios that develop speaking and understanding skills.

I acknowledge my students and am inspired by their enthusiasm for continued growth.  Do you want to build a better brain?  Come join us at Warren Hardy Spanish.

Mexico is Less Deadly than Ten Years Ago

Posted on February 21st, 2010 in Blog by warren

Mexico is less deadly than ten years ago

A study reveals tourists as well as locals are safer than many believe

Monday, February 8, 2010

BY ALEXANDRA OLSON

The Associated Press

MEXICO CITY – The drug war-related violence in the country has obscured a significant fact: A falling homicide rate means people in Mexico are less likely to die violently now than they were more than a decade ago.

It also means tourists as well as locals may be safer than many believe.  Mexico City’s homicide rate today is about on par with Los Angeles and is less than a third of that for Washington, D.C.

Yet many Americans are leery of visiting Mexico at all. Drug violence and the swine flu outbreak contributed to a 12.5 percent decline in air travel to Mexico by U.S. citizens in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, a blow to Mexico’s third-largest source of foreign income.

Mexico, Colombia and Haiti are the only countries in the hemisphere subject to a U.S. government advisory warning travelers about violence, even though homicide rates in many Latin American countries are far higher.

“What we hear is, ’Oh the drug war! The dead people on the streets, and the policeman losing his head,’” said Tobias Schluter, 34, a civil engineer from Berlin having a beer at a cafe behind Mexico City’s 16th-century cathedral. “But we don’t see it. We haven’t heard a gunshot or anything.”

Mexico’s homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro García Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens’ Institute for Crime Studies.

By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil’s was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.  Mexico City’s rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.

“In terms of security, we are like those women who aren’t overweight but when they look in the mirror, they think they’re fat,” said Luis de la Barreda, director of the Citizens’ Institute. “We are an unsafe country, but we think we are much more unsafe that we really are.”

Of course, drug violence has turned some places in Mexico, including the U.S. border region and some parts of the Pacific coast, into near-war zones since President Felipe Calderón intensified the war against cartels with a massive troop deployment in 2006. That has made Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, among the most dangerous cities in the world.
“The violence, homicides and cruel and inhuman assassinations, which fill the pages of our media, make us feel that there has been much more violence since this war against drug trafficking,” said Bishop Miguel Alba Díaz of La Paz, a vacation city at the tip of the Baja California peninsula.

Mexico’s violence is often more shocking than elsewhere in Latin America because powerful cartels go to extremes to intimidate the government and rival smugglers.
Authorities say the vast majority of victims are drug suspects, but bystanders, including children, sometimes get caught in the crossfire.

Mexico has the same problems with corrupt police, gang violence and poverty as other Latin American countries with higher homicide rates. So why the decline in murders?
Experts say while drug violence is up, land disputes have eased. Many farmers have migrated to the cities or abroad and the government has pushed to resolve the land disputes, some centuries old.

De la Barreda attributes the downward trend to a general improvement in Mexico’s quality of life. More Mexicans have joined the ranks of the middle class in the past two decades, while education levels and life expectancy have also risen.

Can an old brain learn?

Posted on February 13th, 2010 in Blog by warren

Can an old brain learn, and then remember what it learns? Put another way, is this a brain that should be studying Spanish?

As it happens, yes. While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.

Many long held views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

One explanation for how this occurs comes from Deborah M. Burke, a professor of psychology at Pomona College in California. Dr. Burke has done research on “tots,” those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know something but can’t quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke’s research shows that such incidents increase in part because neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.

Recently, researchers found some positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, learn Spanish much faster than a young person can.

The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.

“The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger but allowing for greater complexity and deeper understanding,” says Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, who has studied ways to teach adults effectively. “As adults we may not always learn quite as fast, but we are set up for this next developmental step.”

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

“There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.”

Such stretching is exactly what scientists say best keeps a brain in tune: get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Move to Mexico, learn Spanish, or just take a different route to work.

Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”  Moving to a Mexico and learning Spanish will challenge your assumptions!

No wonder we see people in San Miguel de Allende studying Spanish and running around town who are in their seventies and eighties.  These folks are jiggling their synapses!