Transcription
[Music] The brain is wider than the sky, for put them side by side, the one the other will contain with ease. And you [Music] Beside the brain is deeper than the sea, for hold them blue to blue, the one the other will absorb as spong buckets do. The brain is just the weight of God, for heft them pound for pound, and they will differ, if they do, a syllable from sound.
A child's brain: a swirling profusion of billions and billions of neurons reaching out to billions more neurons to form trillions of connections, pulsing with electric and chemical energy. Exuberant connectivity—the cells literally are going wild, making all these connections, discovering each other, forming the basis of what we call something learned. Learning is about connection and connectivity and [Music] exuberance. You start with a block of marble, like a sculpture would, and there's a lot of marble there. A young child has hundreds of trillions of connections in the brain—twice as many connections as the adult. And then comes along the sculptor who takes away bits of the marble to reveal a form. Experience is the sculpture. Experience determines which of those connections to take away and which to leave. That's what learning is: it's changing the weights of the connections in the brain depending on [Music] experience.
The child's brain is plastic, a magnificent, flexible engine for learning. A child learns to crawl, then walk, run, and explore. A child learns to reason, to pay attention, and remember. A child learns to make [Music] friends. But nowhere is learning more dramatic than in the way a child learns to master language—the Great Leap that the brain makes that is nothing short of a miracle. Hello, if me do I'm [Music] King. Have a king too. Oh yeah, I definitely oh yeah, bye bye. So has she started talking yet? She talks, but we don't understand her. Okay, she says words, but they're—there is no meaning. Okay, she probably has about um five words that we can clearly understand. Uh, she says Kitty. She says Elmo. She says daddy. Uh, she says get. She says woof for doggy. Does she have any other words, Nate? I think Nate. Oh, that's right, she says dat for Nate, because that's him—that's the big guy over here. Oo, bues want to [Music] talk. Look at this telephone. Hello, who's [Music] there? Oh, I got a queen. A queen. Let me see.
Language development represents one of these profound, mysterious changes. You're welcome, honey. Thanks. You bring a baby home from the hospital, a wrinkly newborn at 7 lbs, and within 3 years that child can talk in sentences and speak to anyone and deceive you with their words and inspire you with their words. And so it's—how does this come about? Miss me? Like, wait, stay there. I want to do that too. No, I got do with my nanas. Okay. Oh yeah, I want to get bananas too. That's—that would be funny. No bananas. I know that's what I'm try to do. There we go.
Nearly all children learn to speak as easily as a bird learns to sing. No, oh yeah. B A. What? Michael Blankenship is an exception. At 5 years old, by the time most children have mastered grammar, Michael still struggles to make himself understood, and no one yet understands why. Did that guy—did you hear that? Yeah, that guy just see me. When Michael was at the age where you're expecting kids to say Mom or Dad or um some type of a noise, he did not offer to make any type of a sound. Didn't even try. All the other nieces and nephews were—and we were noticing that uh Michael wasn't get her get her get her get her. I think Mike was probably close to 2 and 1/2 to 3 years old before he started saying the normal words that most kids start with. And even at that point, when he would try to say Mom or Dad, it was Ma and dad. He still couldn't say the whole word. Oh, Peach. Oh, like a peach. I don't like peachy, Michael. It's peach. Peach. H of this Rush. Nice try. Ow. He didn't have much of a vocabulary until I would say he was probably 3 and 1/2 years old. Yeah, and then he started picking up on different words, and we knew what he meant cuz he lived with us, but anybody else—our family did not know what he was saying. What does it look like? H? Do I look really big or really small? M? Small.
Michael's difficulties with words have nothing to do with his intelligence. Good. Okay. If you turn around, see what happens in her laboratory at the University of Oregon. Neuroscientist Helen Neville is trying to understand what has gone wrong. B. Yeah, I like that one a lot too. I like to sandwiches eat for lunch. While Michael is distracted by a puppet show, electrodes in the bonnet he wears pick up electrical pulses generated by his brain as he listens to sentences laced with grammatical errors. Kids like to Coke drink from a can. We're eavesdropping on communication and the language system of the brain itself. Make cookies with chocolate chips. Neville is studying the connections between speaking, listening, and understanding—closely linked parts of the brain's complex language system. It's very important to take a language-impaired child and evaluate what's deficient and what isn't. The backyard language depends on so many different systems and structures in the brain that a problem within any one of those systems could lead to a final common problem—that is, a language impairment. Great. All of them down. Let's take a look at what we've got. Jump jump jumped. Oh wait, I want to hear jumped. Perfect. Perfect. While scientists are still searching to understand why the brain sometimes fails to process language successfully. C. Crawled with practice. Children like Michael can improve. Craw. Yes. And what does this one say? Michael still has difficulty producing sounds accurately. Fck. Licked. Wick. Yeah, that's close. For example, the L sound. He doesn't have the L sound. Um, he will work later on sounds like the Rs and the V sounds and the th sounds. Um, he's—he's improved dramatically. So many of the early developing sounds that he didn't have when he was initially seen are now there. Nut. Nut. Very good. That's eight. Make sure you put that T on. Pizza. It's got Che. It's hot. Hot hot hot. Okay. Through repetition and practice, Michael is becoming fluent in the spoken language that is his birthright as a human being. Rat. I r. Okay. He is shaping his own brain, changing it with every syllable and sound. What the kitty. Open gate. Gate. Good job. He's excited to expand his vocabulary and to learn how to say words. When you pet a dog. Pat. Pat. Pat the dog. Very good. Sometimes you can't shut him up, but uh it's—he's—he's coming along. He every—every week there's a difference in his speech. It's getting better and [Music] better. The human brain is highly adaptable, and the young human brain shows even a greater ability to change than older brains. [Music] By studying Michael and others like him, we're getting a very basic understanding of how a system of neurons in the brain could give rise to human language—this marvelous skill which is without limits. Without limits. We can generate new sentences that you've never heard before, uh adding for item, and you can understand them even though you've never heard them before. So how is that possible? She she she she. There are thousands of human languages, and babies are born with the capacity to learn any of [Music] them. They begin by listening. A baby sorts through a babble of sounds with more keen an ear than a conductor rehearsing a symphony [Music] orchestra.
At the University of Washington, neuroscientist Pat Kuhl has been studying the building blocks of language—the vowels and consonants that make up words. In this particular experiment, we're looking at how children respond to the sounds of their native language and the sounds of a foreign language. We're recording what's happening to the brain as the baby's listening to the Chinese Mandarin. She she she she. And then what happens to the brain when that sound is changed to this Chinese Mandarin Chi sound. She she. Now, of course, to us they sound like she she. They sound like the same thing, but we're interested in whether or not the baby's brain records a change when a physical change in the sounds is uh made. As Americans, we cannot hear the distinction. It really sounds like the same category as age. To the Chinese, they say no no. There's a very clear shift. And the interesting thing that the studies have demonstrated is that at birth and for a short period thereafter, babies have this incredibly exquisite ability to hear differences between all the sounds used in the world's languages. The babies are outperforming us. I like to refer to them as citizens of the world in the beginning. And of course, we're not citizens of the world. We're quite culture-bound listeners. At 7 months, babies are still citizens of the world, but by the time they reach 11 months, they are citizens of a single country—specialists in one language. By 11 months, the babies are behaving like their parents. This baby is not responding to—to the change between she and shei. It's now she she to the baby, just like it is for us as adults. The news is that by 11 months we are not perceiving reality. We're not responding to the real differences that exist in the sounds. We're listening through this filter that was developed early in life as we mapped the sounds of our language uh during listening. B B. The baby starts out with a keen ability to hear distinctions. Ready? Should want do it again. The feat of development is to actually form categories and ignore some of those distinctions. There goes the Train. The ones that are great for a foreign language but not for the language you're trying to master. Three three. And that ability has produced a brain that's a very, very different one than we saw just uh 4 months earlier.
As a child grows into an adult, the brain becomes more and more complex—an intricate, modular organ of many highly specialized parts. In nearly all adults, language finds its home in the left cerebral hemisphere. Vocabulary, grammar, comprehension are different language systems with their own neural circuitry. We have very little understanding about how this highly differentiated mosaic comes about. How did it get to be that way? That's what we want to know: is it there at birth? Does it develop over time? What's driving the development? Is it based in our genes or does it depend on experience? What we're going to be doing today is measuring the—the brain's response to words that she understands from the list that you filled out, and we'll be recording over different areas of the brain, so we'll see where there's more activities and where that happens in the brain. How specialized is a baby's brain? What part of the brain does a baby use to understand words? Pint. Unit. Dog. In a series of experiments at the University of California, San Diego, developmental psychologist Debbie Mills has found that 13-month-old babies listen and understand with both cerebral hemispheres. Banana. Ball. Duck. But by 20 months—at a time when babies have been learning as many as a dozen words a day, increasing the size of their vocabulary dramatically—the language center of the brain has begun to shift to the left hemisphere. [Music] Milk. What is driving this specialization of language? Is it an inevitable biological process, a product of the child's maturing brain, or is it a result of a child's increasing experience with words? Where's the diaper? Good job.
Children who understand more than one language are helping scientists answer these questions. Ariel Elgas is almost 2 because her parents speak English and Spanish. She understands both languages, but she knows more Spanish words than English ones, which makes Ariel a perfect subject for Mills's experiment. Baby bubbles. If age alone is driving brain specialization, then by 2, both English and Spanish should have begun to shift into Ariel's left hemisphere. But if increasing vocabulary size is driving specialization, then Ariel's left hemisphere will respond to Spanish words while English will provoke a response everywhere in her brain. Compute. AA. In fact, Mills and her research team have found that in children like Ariel, the brain has begun to specialize in response to Spanish—the language they know best. Cookie. English words provoke a more diffuse response all across the brain. That really suggests that it is experience with language that's driving these specializations. It can't be maturation because it's in the same child and in the same brain. The startling, astonishing revelation that has occurred over the past few years is that experience is a major player in driving the development and differentiation of the [Music] brain.
If language takes its place—place in the left hemisphere, what happens when the left hemisphere is compromised by injury or [Music] disease? For most of her life, 8-year-old Katie War has suffered seizures so devastating that today she can no longer even talk. After agonizing discussions with doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, her parents have made up their minds. [Music] Katie's doctors have advised them that their little girl has just one hope of living like other children. Daddy, we'll see you. Strike at the seizures by eliminating the place in the brain where they are found—the left hemisphere. Katie is going to have nearly half her brain surgically removed. When they tell you that, all you hear is the risk. For years ago we said, I'm sorry, but we're not even going to consider that—that's not even an option for us. We're going to exhaust all of our possibilities with drugs before we can even think about that. Well, 4 years later we did. There is no more drugs out there for her. She's been on them all. The operation will take 6 [Music] hours. If it succeeds, her seizures will stop, and Katie might even learn to talk [Music] again. I just have to keep telling myself the outcome is going to be worth it. The outcome's going to be worth it. Stay out of the de.
It was 7 years ago that 14-year-old Michael Raybine had the left part of his brain removed. Every 2 years he joins other children like him for a reunion. They are a small band of children who have struggled back from an operation that has cured their seizures but robbed them of part of their brain, leaving them with half their body paralyzed. He had learned to walk again, learned how to talk again. First, you know, it was—it was just like being an infant again too. Had to start from scratch. He knew his ABCs and he could count backwards from 10. He had to learn all that all over again, so it was pretty hard. It was an uphill battle. It still is today. There's things today that he has to learn every day of his life. You doing okay? Yeah. Yeah. You look great. All right. I'll tell you what we're going to start with doing—um, I'm going to say two words. I want you to listen to them really closely and tell me whether they're the same word or whether they're different words. Are you ready? Pat. Bat. Def. Fit. Feet. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, neuroscientist Dana Boatman has been testing Michael Raybine ever since his left hemisphere was removed—part of her study of how children learn to understand spoken language. Same. One of the surprising findings of our study is that when we test Michael's abilities to understand speech independent of his ability to speak, he performs within normal limits for his age. Tick. The right hemisphere seems to do every bit as good a job at understanding spoken speech as the left hemisphere, and it suggests to us that those abilities are not just in the left hemisphere, but that they're represented in both hemispheres of the brain. Ready? Wear some headphones. Are you going to stay awake for this? I thought you got a nap today. I did. Oh, so you need another one. It seems that there is much more plasticity there than we had originally anticipated. How do you account for the fact that you can do all these things? Try best. Persistence. Persistence is the key. Determination. You do seem like a really hard worker. I watched you doing those tests. Are those tough? What a—it—some easy, some hard. What's the hard part? Is it me remembering it? No. Speak. Speech is the most difficult thing for a left hemisphere patient to overcome because you lose your speech center. On—inside. Memory is good. He can remember anything. I love math, but speaking hard little a bit. [Music]
Every Saturday all through the summer, Michael races mini stock cars at the Tri-County Speedway near his home in Upstate New York. You flipped over once, didn't you? More than once. How many times did you go over? Twice. My SC scar. Half death. I closed my eyes. You must close your eyes too. Oh, my heart was in my throat. We saw you holding your own, and then we saw the car break down. What happened? That Spug plug broke. A spark plug. That—all it was. And daddy didn't have one in his pocket. How'd that feel? Oh, I'm sad. You hate it when the little things let you down, don't you? Bu [Music] mhm. What was Michael like before the surgery? Do you remember? Climb a tree. Yep. Very athletic. [Music] You were at Tasty Freeze one night, remember? Mhm. And you looked around, couldn't find Mike. He was up on the pool. Then the seizures hit. When local doctors could not tell the Rabines what was wrong, they took Michael to Johns Hopkins Hospital. I think that they knew what it was before we ever got there, just from the descriptions, looking at them. And then they just kind of dropped it on us. They took a lot of decision—a lot of soul-searching to do it. When on a day when he had a good day, when he might have 50, 60, or 70 seizures, you—you kind of had to sit there and go, do we really want to do—do this to him? You know, is it something that's going to benefit him? Then the next day and then the next day he may have 3, 400 seizures, and it was like, no, there's no doubt in your mind today. Finally, you know, it got to the point where we got so bad that we—we had to do something. And then the day we sent him into surgery, he didn't have any seizures that [Music] day. [Music] [Applause] [Music] I began testing in Michael as early as the first week after he had surgery, and despite the fact that he was largely muted that time, he was showing an intact ability to—to hear and to process spoken speech. That suggests to us that these children may have the abilities already in place in the right hemisphere to acquire language, and that they can then build on those abilities and develop language. By 6 months after surgery, Michael's speech understanding abilities were back to what they were before surgery. At that point, he was producing one-two-word utterances [Music] spontaneously. Very slowly, the ability to produce words comes back over the course of a couple of years. [Music] Years. The extent to which they're able to produce fluent speech seems to vary from child to child. I got Michael in my class about—I think it was 7—even months after the operation, and he was not using full sentences. He was only speaking in two or three-word phrases and doing lots of gesturing. We worked hard trying to get Michael to increase his vocabulary, to speak sentences. I remember the first full sentence that he—that he told me—that he gave us. He said um to me, I love you with all my [Music] heart. Michael. Yeah. Are you awake? Yes. Are you going to be taking a nap in there? No. By scanning the brains of children like Michael who have lost their left hemispheres, Dana Boatman is trying to learn how the brain's language systems have been reorganized. Are you ready to start working? Yeah. You're going to hear those sounds now. I want you to decide if they're the same or different. If they're the same, you're going to press the button. Do you remember that part? [Music] Yeah. We know that the right hemisphere is supporting language recovery. We're now starting to try and identify the exact areas in the right hemisphere that are being recruited. Is it the same area that the child used in the left hemisphere, or is it a different area? Do they need more of the right hemisphere to support language than they may have needed previously in the left hemisphere? Boatman's preliminary findings show that areas in the right hemisphere that take on the job of understanding language correspond to the language areas in the left hemisphere, but the right hemisphere is not as efficient as the left. Michael needs more of his right hemisphere to understand the spoken word than a child with both hemispheres. We have children as old now as 16 years of age who have had left hemispherectomies who are able to recover the ability to understand spoken speech every bit as—as well as they did before surgery and as do normal children. So this suggests that we need to revise our notion of uh an age limit on when these surgeries can be done and take into consideration the fact that different language functions may be affected differently by age. All right, there you are. That's the shot right in there. He's still the same boy inside that he was before the surgery. Right there. He didn't lose his drive or his determination. He'll just keep trying and trying and trying. Get it. H it. I was going to say we've learned to rely on each other a great deal. We're a very close family, aren't we, Bud? Yeah. In a way, this kind of stole some of his childhood, and it stole it from us too, because you know the years that—when he's in first, second grade, those are pretty precious. I mean they're still precious, the years that we had, but they were pretty frustrating too, you know. We couldn't ask for a nicer boy. [Music] Now there's a laugh in the plasticity of the child's brain. There is continual reason for hope. You want more push?
6 months after her left hemisphere was removed, Katie War is no longer suffering relentless firestorms in her brain. While the years of seizures have left their mark, Katie's right hemisphere is adapting to its new responsibilities. It's just a joy to hear her excited about something. She wakes up happy. She's really in tune to what's going on around her. She's a whole lot more aware. You got reach. It's—it's like an awakening. I—I told Robert it's like having a different child. We have to learn to get to know her all over again. Katie's language is beginning to come back. Ready? Her understanding has improved, and she is showing signs of talking. Uhoh. Oh, you don't want that ball. You want this ball. There—sounds and noises starting to come out of her in her own little way—in her own little language, just like a baby does. You know how they—when they first start to say words, they're not very clear, but you kind of get the message of what they want. Eyes. Ears. Nose. Every couple weeks or something we'll see something different. Feel like you're so close. You know it's just like tomorrow come up and say hi, Mom and Dad. What's for breakfast? You know, it's just that close. You can just see her—see her forming the words and trying to get them out, but I imagine it's a little tougher, you know, with the damage and stuff. So well, we're looking forward to it. Yeah.
There was once a prince who wanted to marry a princess, but she had to be a real princess. The prince looked and looked, and he met many princesses, but the prince sent all of them away. One day there was a big storm. For most of us, speaking is as natural and inevitable as walking. Come in, said the king. Come in, said the queen. Reading is a high-wire balancing act, a performance by the brain that demands a sophisticated coordination of many of its parts. Reading never just happens. Reading is an example of one of the most complex everyday human cognitive performances we have—have. And she went off to make the bed. If we're novice or young, it happens in a certain way in the brain. If we're older, automatic processes are being used in other parts of the brain. If we're—we're reading Chinese characters, one aspect of our brain is being used. If we're reading an alphabet, another aspect of our brain is being used. Once long ago in a dark, lonely place—place where the light of the sun was never to be seen, there lived an elant creature with hollow cheeks and waxen complexion. Across the valley, in a place where the sun played on every leaf and flower, lived a maiden with cheeks like rose petals and hair like golden silk. Well, think syntax, think vocabulary, think words that you never ever hear in oral discourse around the table. The child has to learn to put all these hundreds of concepts together to read. Tab is a cat. Tab has a pal. Tab is for. For some children, reading comes easily. Mac is a bad pal. Pet has the ham. Pet pet hit had the pen. For others, it is a struggle that has nothing to do with their powers to think or reason. The him.
Nice job. Want to try it one more time?
In order to be able to read, we have to understand what the C correspondences between the sounds that make up words and the visual information that we provide in letters. And so what happens is, for example, compared to language, which children acquire quite naturally, uh, reading has to be explicitly taught. All right, are you ready? Quick as you [Music] can. How about this one? Oh my, you got it.
Reading is many different kinds of behaviors. It's letter [Music] naming; it's letter perception—we got to make sure we know which letter it is—the stick is first, ship, slip. It's word perception—stick, spin. It's recognizing words; it's [Music] comprehension. And all those behaviors will utilize different parts of the brain, whether we're talking about a single letter or whether we're talking about reading a passage of PR. The P is hot, put the to read. The brain must cobble together a variety of parts that evolved for other purposes: vision, hearing, judgment, memory—all come into play in a rapid-fire, overlapping process that scientists are only just beginning to understand.
We are looking at a a very um unusual skill that we have learned, and the question is, when we learn a skill like that, where do we place it in the brain? What part of the brain becomes available to do this very specific [Music] skill? For a child just learning to read, even a single letter will set off a complex series of [Music] reactions. The brain begins by focusing its attention on the reading task itself; then it captures a visual representation of the letter and sends it to the areas of the brain where the visual symbol gets hooked up to the letter's sound and meaning: trap, trap. Finally, the letter is articulated: s, flat. It's incredible, flat, PL. We've got about 17 different regions that are all involved in reading; one of them can easily go ay. So why don't we start right here? What's this word? Shoulder, island, island. Correctly. Scientifics, banquet, doubtful. Is it okay if I skip that word? You want, can you give it a try? Okay, just give it your best shot, Miss Chall. All right, here we go, buddy. How about these?
I have this um this thing in my brain that's called xxia. I know the first one, hesitating. It means something I don't know, happening in my brain. I don't really know much about it; my dad does. We'd always um been um impressed with how intelligent Russell really is, and um he has incredible creativity; he has a strong vocabulary; he's very interested in the outside world; he can put concepts together; he's very logical; and he's in fact a very bright boy. MCU, what's that one? MCU.
The ability to learn to read is a gift that not all children receive equally. Millions, like 8-year-old Russell Train, are dyslexic, unable to translate the squiggles on the page into sound and meaning. Say one more [Music] time. Let's move on to these. I know they're hard. When you were little and you started going to school and you started learning how to to read, how did that—how was that going for you? Okay, because they're mostly like the words this big. And how about as you got older and started trying to learn to read other things? What—what was that uh? It was getting a little harder for me because the words were getting bigger and the reading was getting a little more complicated and stuff. There is some family history of uh of this: very bright people but trouble learning to read. I repeated third grade; my middle sister repeated kindergarten; and we were just told that we had to repeat and go to after-school study hall. OASD, you just a slow learner. OSG PSD, a dyslexia is the inability to learn to process written language despite adequate intelligence, adequate sensory, adequate exposure. You have adequate everything, and and yet your system has been differently wired. What is happening in the brain of a dyslexic child that makes reading so difficult?
At Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC, neuroscientist Gwen Eden is scanning the brains of dyslexic children to see how they are different from children who read without problems. Russell, can you hear me? Okay, yeah. Is it loud enough? Yeah, thank you. We're still trying to grapple really with what is the mechanism for dyslexia: how does the brain of a dyslexic differ? Brain imaging studies have shown that there are some areas that we see are active in individuals who are good readers during a reading task that we don't see in in individuals who have dyslexia: is oh AMP. One part of Eden's study examines the brains of dyslexic children as they try to remove the first sound from words flashed on a screen. Scientists have demonstrated that the brains of some dyslexic children are not active in areas responsible for dissecting words into their constituent sounds. Children who have dyslexia really never understand the concept that one word may be made up of several sounds; for example, the in the word cat, the sounds a and—we just blend them all together, and when we grow up speaking we just say them as one sound, and that's all we need to do to convey the meaning. But now when we have to map that sound onto print, we have to understand that there are actually three sounds that make up the word cat. Um, that fundamental ability to take the speech stream and get it into its tiny sound parts is pivotal in reading; otherwise, the teacher up there saying B and the child has no idea what she's doing. I know you've used the tiles before, so I'm going to show you some letters, and I want you to tell me the sounds of these letters: i n, contion, good.
Dyslexic children learn, but they learn differently. The Lindamood-Bell program offers several strategies to help them examined really closely, looked at like um the plac. Okay, so what we're going to do, Russell, is some color encoding or with the blocks. I'm going to give you a word, and you just put out the block for each sound that you feel. Okay, the first word is flip. Good job. So what word do we have all together again? Flip. Good job. If what we're prescribing for Russell's treatment is a procedure where we slow down the articulation of how we say words, he needs to be hyper-sensitized to the ability to take those sounds and pull them apart, but but equally important to then put them back together, which is what we do when we read. Can you tell me the labels for the sounds, what your mouth is—what you feel your mouth doing? Oh, it's great. And when you make the P sound, is your tongue tapping or is your are your lips popping? Um, popping. Right. So we call that a lip pop. Yeah, lip popper. This sound here, we stimulate their ability to give conscious attention to what they feel when they produce a particular sound. Um, a smile sound. Yeah. Why do we call it a smile sound? Because when you say it, makes your own mouth smile. Very good. We know and we can see that you're getting behavioral changes; in other words, children—we can teach children to read better. What we don't understand are what are the mech—what are the mechanisms in the brain that at a neurophysiological level change as a result of that [Music] process?
After 6 weeks at Lindamood-Bell, Russell's reading has improved, and Gwen Eden wants to know how his brain has changed. Oh, based on previous studies with dyslexic adults who improved their reading skills, Eden speculates that Russell now uses more areas of his brain to read than normal readers, possibly even parts of his right hemisphere. The thing will be more meaningful when we have several children who've done the same thing; that gives us a a much better view on, you know, what's really going on rather than just saying something about one child, other two children. Right, right. It will be several years before Eden completes her study, but while she and other scientists wait to understand how dyslexic children continue to remodel their own [Music] brains, childhood can be one of the most wonderful periods of all of life because we have everything to [Music] discover. The child is father of the man, mother of the [Music] woman. I think the brain must be having a great time as a child because it's all plastic. If there's any one word for development in learning, it's plasticity, and plasticity I believe can be [Music] lifelong.
Next time on The Secret Life of the Brain: the teenage brain, vulnerable to the dangers of drugs. I'm an addict, and I need I need help. And the chaos of schizophrenia. I spent 19 years with the same personality, and all of a sudden it was taken away. Next time: the teenage brain. Take a 3D animated tour of the brain at PBS online. Find brain teasers, take a cognitive test, and more at at [Music] pbs.org [Music].
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