Do Rats Suffer from ADD?
David Foster and his colleagues say that when rats take a break while exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains instantly replay the information they've just gathered.
As the rats run across a track, certain brain cells fire in a specific sequence. Each cell picks a "favorite place" on the track to go off, and a pattern emerges that is replicated every time the rat repeats the route. This "place cell" effect has been documented for more than 30 years.
These place cells lie in the hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory and navigation….When the rats took a break after running the track, the same place cells fired in reverse order. Replaying multiple times, these patterns were sped up, Foster says, almost 20 times faster.
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"This immediately suggested some kind of learning mechanism occurring at times when the animal has just had an experience, but has in fact stopped," Foster says. This pattern has been observed in sleep and is often interpreted as consolidation of the memory, a process that reorganizes the information and stores it in other parts of the brain.
Foster: "Perhaps we don't take breaks seriously enough," Foster says. "Perhaps we're wrong to expect all learning to occur on the job. Perhaps an important part of learning in general, and in jobs and at school, is occurring during breaks."
The finding is consistent with long-established behavioral evidence (about humans) that practice is more effective if it is interspersed with other activity. It also seems to be consistent with the symptoms of ADD:
From another of my blogs (Spin of Attention): shifts from one uncompleted task to another.
I think the value of shifting attention and taking breaks is well recognized in psychology and elsewhere. Perhaps even in schools. At least until the discussion of ADD comes up. Then, because it inconveniences the school system, it is a disorder. Only a few days ago, I posted a blog about comments from John Taylor Gatto based on 30 tears of teaching experience.
How public education cripples our kids, and why
I interpreted his comments into a view from the students: “They pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn.”
Back in the days of Communism, opposition to the Communist government was sometimes treated as a mental illness. If students in the school system do not pretend to learn, we are being advised to treat this behavior as a disorder.
No similarity at all. Nobody would see a parallel here. Unless they were paying attention.
As the rats run across a track, certain brain cells fire in a specific sequence. Each cell picks a "favorite place" on the track to go off, and a pattern emerges that is replicated every time the rat repeats the route. This "place cell" effect has been documented for more than 30 years.
These place cells lie in the hippocampus, which plays a key role in memory and navigation….When the rats took a break after running the track, the same place cells fired in reverse order. Replaying multiple times, these patterns were sped up, Foster says, almost 20 times faster.
------
"This immediately suggested some kind of learning mechanism occurring at times when the animal has just had an experience, but has in fact stopped," Foster says. This pattern has been observed in sleep and is often interpreted as consolidation of the memory, a process that reorganizes the information and stores it in other parts of the brain.
Foster: "Perhaps we don't take breaks seriously enough," Foster says. "Perhaps we're wrong to expect all learning to occur on the job. Perhaps an important part of learning in general, and in jobs and at school, is occurring during breaks."
The finding is consistent with long-established behavioral evidence (about humans) that practice is more effective if it is interspersed with other activity. It also seems to be consistent with the symptoms of ADD:
From another of my blogs (Spin of Attention): shifts from one uncompleted task to another.
I think the value of shifting attention and taking breaks is well recognized in psychology and elsewhere. Perhaps even in schools. At least until the discussion of ADD comes up. Then, because it inconveniences the school system, it is a disorder. Only a few days ago, I posted a blog about comments from John Taylor Gatto based on 30 tears of teaching experience.
How public education cripples our kids, and why
I interpreted his comments into a view from the students: “They pretend to teach us and we pretend to learn.”
Back in the days of Communism, opposition to the Communist government was sometimes treated as a mental illness. If students in the school system do not pretend to learn, we are being advised to treat this behavior as a disorder.
No similarity at all. Nobody would see a parallel here. Unless they were paying attention.
posted by Selby Evans at 12:36 PM
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