Joseph Biederman is probably THE leading advocate for more aggressive diagnoses and more aggressive medical treatments of children with severe neuro-behavioral problems. If you track the research history of this prominent Harvard scientist and his Massachusetts General Hospital colleagues, it documents the development of a new diagnosis of the misbehaving, out-of-control child as “bipolar”, and…
No blogs for a few days, because I have been attending a scientific meeting in Crete, and have now moved on to attend a second meeting in Jerusalem. The focus of the meeting in Crete was on the neurological processes contributing to normal and abnormal brain development. I am struck at meetings like this by…
In his Comments, Daniel has asked a lot of questions, and I thought that I’d take a minute to answer two of them. First, after I reviewed a book (Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold, Hyperion:New York, 2007) in which a schizophrenic individual provided her personal descriptions of her life with this illness, he asked…
Over the past three years, we have conducted several research projects at Rossmoor, a retirement community with about 9,000 residents about 20 miles east of San Francisco. Rossmoor is in a beautiful rural setting in a narrow valley surrounded by oak-cloaked hills. I have given a number of lectures there, and am always struck by…
I just read a report from the Everett, Massachusetts school district that illustrates what CAN be achieved in helping children catch up, in a very short time. Everett is a north-Boston suburb that was once rated as a top Massachusetts district, but a change in its demographics over the past 40 years has greatly increased…
A large, controlled study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education has just shown that a widely mandated program (Reading First) delivered to promulgate ‘best practices’ for reading education out to American schools in need of help as a >$1 billion part of the “No Child Left Behind” program leaves children behind. The Reading First…
If you haven’t done your homework (haven’t read “misconceptions 1-4”), go do it, then read this one. You’ll find those entries on November 7th, December 5th, April 29th, and May 1st. Which lead us to: Misconception 5. Our functional abilities at any stage of life are a handoff from Mother Nature or the Creator of…
Many of you may have seen this program. At last count, it has been shown several thousand times. Almost every PBS station has repeatedly aired it. Moreover, like a bad penny, it’ll show up again, in the next pledge-break period! All of this attention stems from its success. PBS viewers have made this one of…
An important recent study reported by scientists from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell and Rutgers universities (Gaab N, Gabrieli JD, Deutsch GK, Tallal P, Temple E, Restor Neurol Neurosci 25:295-310, 2007) has documented the emergence of more normal brain response patterns resulting from intensive brain plasticity-based training, in children with impairments in language and reading abilities. …
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