One of the brain-related issues of special interest to educators is the place of “enrichment" in early education. Science writer Janet Hopson and anatomist Marian Diamond have written about research conducted since the 1960s establishing that rats allowed to play with toys and other rats have thicker, heavier brains than rats kept in isolation. The extra weight and thickness is mostly because their brains have formed more connections among neurons. The rats that live in the enriched environment can run different kinds of mazes with greater ease than rats that live in the impoverished environment. The rats that sit and watch other rats in the enriched environment have fewer measurable changes than rats that actually participate. Researchers have found that the growth of rat’s brains in response to experience (and the apparent shrinkage from the lack of it) occurs not just in the weeks following birth, but at all ages.



Even more interesting, the same is true for humans. “We know that early-childhood experience actually creates the brain’s architecture," says William Staso,

Ph. D., a California, educational psychologist and author of What Stimulation Your Baby Needs to Become Smart. “Interaction and stimulation physically determine how intricately the neurocircuitry of the brain is wired, which ultimately determines how smart we’ll be."

How does experience create brain architecture? As the human nerve cell gets stimulated by new experiences and by exposure to incoming information from the senses, it grows branches called dendrites. Dendrites are the major receptive surfaces of the nerve cell. Amazingly, one nerve cell can receive input from as many as 20,000 other nerve cells. And if you have 100 billion cells in your brain, think of the complexity! With use, you grow branches: with impoverishment, you lose them. This ability to change the structure and chemistry in response to the environment is called plasticity.

Hence, our challenge in education is to determine what makes an enriched classroom environment. Probably, were going to find that it’s the interaction of the student’s mind with the materials, the simulations – all the things that good teachers have always done to make learning meaningful so that students sprout new dendrites, which form new connections and become strong through review. Therefore, Diamond and Hopson recommend a set of experiences at each age level from birth to adolescence that they believe constitute “enrichment" for humans.

However, Bruer cautions that enriched conditions for rats, which he prefers to call “complex," are really just approximations of a rat’s natural environment in the wild. Most human children are not kept in cages, so we have no way of knowing what would be the equivalent of an enriched environment for humans.

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