baby brains and you

Brain Scan Clue to Delayed Speech

Miami Children's Hospital used sophisticated MRI scans to compare the brains of children with and without speech problems.

More activity was found on the right side of the brains of children with delayed speech. The others tended to use the left side.

[...] The researchers also found that the children with delayed speech had less total brain activity.

This, they suggest, indicates that they are less stimulated by language than normal.

[...] [Sue Roulstone, of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists] said the left side of the brain was thought to be closely linked to processing of language.

However, she said the fact that children with speech problems appeared to be using the right side of their brains to "listen" was not necessarily a bad thing.

It may indicate that their brains had taken steps to overcome difficulties with the more usual language processing centres.

"They may be engaging some other part of the brain to assist with the process of understanding language," she said.

more brain power to ponder

Bias Taxes Brain, Research Finds

According to the findings [of a Dartmouth study], the more biased people are, the more their brain power is taxed by contact with someone of another race, as they struggle not to say or do anything offensive. The effect is so strong, the team found, that even a five-minute conversation with a black person left some of the white subjects unable to perform well on a test of cognitive ability.

[...] Richeson and her colleagues began by recruiting a group of white Dartmouth undergraduates and asked them to perform an "Implicit Association Test," a test that is widely used to measure unconscious racial bias. The subject is given a screen and two buttons. First, the subject is asked to push the button on the left if the word that appears on the screen is a positive word, like beauty, or a common first name for a white person, such as Nancy. Otherwise, they are instructed to push the button on the right.

After a session, the test is changed slightly, and the names given are those more common for a black person, such as Tyrone. The greater the difference between the reaction times in the two sessions, the more the person has trouble associating black names with positive concepts.

Next the team had each of the students speak briefly with a black experimenter and then perform a test of cognitive ability called the Stroop test. They showed that the higher a bias score the student had in the IAT test, the worse they did on the Stroop test after speaking with the black experimenter.
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