When I was in high school, I had to drive a long distance on a freeway to get to school. After arriving, I often wondered how I got there. I didn't remember the drive or even thinking about driving.

This feeling is a common (and, yes, somewhat scary) experience that a group of neuroscientists think they can better explain. In an experiment with rats, researchers at MIT identified two distinct neural circuits in the brain that show distinct changes when the rats were learning to navigate a maze and, later, after they mastered the task.

The rats were placed in a maze that had chocolate sprinkles at the end. The activity in specific parts of their brains was analyzed as they learned the maze, which included a T-juncture where they had to stop and choose to turn right or left. The rats performed the maze repeatedly until they had learned it.

The study showed that one specific neural circuit became stronger with practice. A second neural circuit showed high activity occurring at times when the rats had to make a decision in the maze. But as they learned the maze, activity in this circuit declined. The task had become habitual.

So, arriving at school in one piece wasn't just a matter of luck. "It is good to know that we can train our brains to develop good habits and avoid bad ones," the lead author of the study, Ann Graybiel, said in a news release.

Understanding how specific regions of the brain change through learning could help in developing new treatments for brain-based diseases. The study was published Thursday in the journal Neuron.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Advanced Cell Technology Inc.

Leonardo da Vinci took them, as did Napoleon Bonaparte, Johannes Brahms and Winston Churchill. I'll bet you could use one right now.

Midday naps have long been touted as a good thing, lowering blood pressure and driving down your risk of heart attack. If you snooze long enough, researchers have found they also permit your memory banks to do their filing, leaving your brain cleared and ready to learn in the latter half of the day.

UC Berkeley psychology professor Matthew Walker and colleagues put 39 young adults through a demanding learning task  and tested on it at noon. At 2 p.m., they divided the students into two groups and invited half of them to take a siesta for 90 minutes, while asking the remainder to stay awake. At 6 p.m., both groups were returned to the day's learning task and tested again.

The siesta group went into the 6 p.m. task readier to learn, and performed 10% better on the test than they had earlier. The no-nap group's performance declined by 10%, Walker reported. While not all the nappers slept for the same length of time, those who had more stage-2 non-REM sleep, a lighter form of sleep in which one does not dream, had the greatest performance enhancement.

The group presented its findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego this week, where I'll bet a lot of the nation's scientists are making good use of the findings after lunch in darkened meeting rooms.

You'd be amazed at how many people are devoted to the napping lifestyle. Check out this book, or blog, for instance.

-- Melissa Healy

Photo: Leiana Takeda, left, and her sister Kanaha of San Diego, take a nap. Credit: Christina House / For The Times

Former President George W. Bush once gave a speech in which he said, "The left hand now knows what the right hand is doing." But while stating this, he gestured first with his right hand and and then with his left. The "Bushism" made Letterman's Top 10 list, but it also illustrates a point of contention among some language researchers: Just how entwined are speech and gestures?

Researchers at Colgate University offer new evidence that speech and gesture form an integrated system of language. In a paper published online this week in the journal Psychological Science, they described two experiments in which people were able to comprehend information faster if speech and gestures were congruent. In a second study, they showed that people can't help but consider one form of language (a gesture) when they are processing another form (speech).

The studies add some significance to the importance of gestures. Gesture is usually considered as a context for speech, but the studies showed that speech is also a context for gesture. "The two modalities may co-determine meaning during language comprehension," the authors write. Speech and gesture, they say, "are simply two sides of the same coin: language."

The take-home message for those of us who wish to communicate better: "[I]f you really want to make your point clear and readily understood, let your words and hands do the talking."

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais  /  Associated Press

It's not surprising that an intensive six-month training program for children with poor reading skills improves their performance, as a new study has demonstrated. The unexpected finding is that the skills program actually spurred brain changes that could be the underpinnings for the children's progress.
 
The study, published today in the journal Neuron, was lauded by the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas R. Insel. The NIMH funded the research.
 
"We have known that behavioral training can enhance brain function," Insel said in a news release. "The exciting breakthrough here is detecting changes in brain connectivity with behavioral treatment. This finding with reading deficits suggests an exciting new approach to be tested in the treatment of mental disorders, which increasingly appear to be due to problems in specific brain circuits."
 
The study's authors, from Carnegie Mellon University, randomly assigned 35 children to an intensive remedial reading program and 12 children to a control group receiving normal classroom instruction. The children in both groups were poor readers. A group of 25 children who were rated average or above-average readers was also studied. The researchers used an imaging device called diffusion tensor imaging to look at the children's white matter, the substance in the brain that is key to communications throughout the central nervous system. 
 
At the start of the study, the poor readers showed lower quality white matter connections in one part of the brain. But after six months of intensive training, the poor readers showed big increases in this matter. Children who did not receive the training did not show the increase.
 
The study supports the use of intense behavioral learning programs to address such deficits as reading disabilities, the authors said. This approach could also be used for treating other conditions in which connections in the brain are key, such as autism.
 
-- Shari Roan
 
Photo credit: Iris Schneider / Los Angeles Times

In a head-to-head comparison with the kind of care most autistic youngsters receive, a program of intensive training aimed at autistic toddlers as young as a year old demonstrated better results in boosting IQ levels, communication skills and adaptive behavior.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics and released Monday, was the first clinical trial to demonstrate the effectiveness of a "comprehensive developmental behavioral intervention" for the very young with autism. In it, 24 children between 18 and 30 months diagnosed with autism received 20 hours a week of training from University of Washington clinicians. The training was aimed at teaching children verbal and nonverbal communications skills within the context of a warm, close teacher-student relationship. A comparison group of 24 toddlers diagnosed with autism got care typically available to such kids in U.S. communities.

Encouraging the expression of positive emotions, promoting eye contact and rewarding social interaction were at the heart of the teaching strategies, said lead author Geraldine Dawson, a University of North Carolina psychologist and chairwoman of the scientific advisory committee of the patient-advocacy group Autism Speaks. The kids' parents got specialized training to use the teaching strategies that teachers used, including paying attention and responding to the child's cues.

After a year, the IQs of toddlers in the special intervention program rose an average of 15.4 points compared with an increase of 4.4 points for those in customary post-diagnosis care. By the second year, the intervention group's IQs rose by 17.6 points, compared with 7 points for the comparison group. Researchers chalk up much of this to major advances in the language-expression and comprehension of the kids in the intervention group. Parents rated their childrens' daily living skills, socialization and motor skills at one and two years: Those receiving the experimental intervention made significant gains, and those receiving typical community care fell significantly behind.

Kids who got the special program were more likely to have their diagnosis changed from autism to pervasive developmental disorder than were those who did not get the intervention, the study also found.

At a time when physicians are being urged to screen children by 18 to 24 months for signs of autism, it is urgent that parents and physicians have an effective program that is designed to intervene immediately after a diagnosis, Dawson said. The program demonstrated effective in this study can be used to treat children 12 months to 48 months, she added.

The next steps will be to see how long the benefits of the early intervention last: Dawson said her team has just finished following the children involved in this study for two years after the program ended. And a new, larger clinical trial will test the early-intervention program at several sites, including the University of Michigan, University of North Carolina and UC Davis' MIND Institute.

--Melissa Healy

They may not be old enough to talk, but babies less than a week old know how cry in their native language.

Researchers have known that infants have the ability to mimic speech starting at around 12 weeks of age. They also show a preference for spoken language that mirrors the rhythm, melody and intensity patterns of their mother tongue.

But when they’re too young to control their vocal cords or the muscles that shape the mouth to make specific sounds, how can babies demonstrate that they’re tuned into the chatter around them? Through their cries, suggests a team of European scientists.

The researchers recorded the cries uttered by 30 French and 30 German newborns when they were hungry, having their diapers changed, or generally out of sorts. Though the babies were only 2 to 5 days old, they already cried in distinct patterns.

The wails of the French babies started out low and rose to a higher pitch, while those of their German counterparts started out high and fell to a lower pitch. The German babies also cried with more intensity than the French babies, the researchers found. These patterns matched the intonation patterns of spoken French (in which the pitch tends to rise over the course of several words) and German (in which the opposite occurs).

The scientists said babies start to pick up on the melody of ambient language during their third trimester in the womb. They can’t hear all the phonetic details of their mothers’ speech, but they can perceive the overall patterns or phrases and sentences. Imitating those patterns probably helps newborns endear themselves to their mothers, the researchers theorized.

The results were published online today by the journal Current Biology.

-- Karen Kaplan

Photo: Turns out the language of baby cries is not universal. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Sleep is essential for memory, including learning motor skills after practicing them. But sleep--and when that sleep takes place--may also enhance memory of motor skills that are learned just through observation, according to a new study. The findings could have implications for children, athletes, and those who have to relearn basic skills after suffering an injury or stroke.

Researchers showed a video of a hand performing parallel finger tapping tests to 64 people. The study participants were later asked to perform the same sequence of the task or a different one. Participants who slept within 12 hours of the observation improved the speed and accuracy of their finger tapping skills. No improvements were noted if the participants slept more than 12 hours after the initial observation. And, practicing the movements wasn't required to improve skills.

In the study, the authors wrote, "These results could have implications for (re)learning movements in cases where practice is difficult or impossible, as in children, during rehabilitation following stroke or fractures, or in complex skill acquisition in, for example, sports or surgical techniques. An important recommendation in such circumstances would be to perform the observation just before sleep onset."

The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

-- Jeannine Stein

Photo credit: Beatrice de Gea / Los Angeles Times

U R prolly not going to believe this, but chatspeak doesn't turn kids into bad spellers.

Srsly.

A new study found that regularly using chatspeak -- the official term is simple messaging service -- doesn't automatically make teens bad spellers. This is a major concern among some parents who think that frequent texting will transform their children into abbreviating, acronyming, emoticoning adults who think "what" is really spelled "wat."

Chatspeak was analyzed from about 40 students ages 12 to 17. The teens were also asked to take a standard spelling test. The Canadian researchers discovered the young people used an enormous range of types of new language, and that girls outranked boys in use of new language.

But they didn't find much evidence that using abbreviated words, shortcuts, word combinations, letters and numbers or even phonetic spellings was connected with bad spelling. Overall, general spelling ability was linked with making spelling errors, not with using new language in instant messaging. The researchers did discover that boys who were poorer spellers tended to use more new language and more abbreviations.

In a news release, lead author Connie Varnhagen, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, said: "Kids who are good spellers [academically] are good spellers in instant messaging. And kids who are poor spellers in English class are poor spellers in instant messaging."

The study was recently published in the journal Reading and Writing.

-Jeannine Stein

Photo credit: Matt Sayles / Associated Press

There's no topic more incendiary than spanking. Add to that the spanking of very young children by  mothers in minority, low-income households and you have a minefield.

A group of Duke University researchers has not only ventured into that minefield; it has also set off a few bombs in the process. Published in this month's issue of the journal Child Development, their study of 2,573 toddlers enrolled in Head Start found that for poor children, early and frequent spanking -- by the age of 1 -- is not only very common, but it also makes their behavior at age 2 more aggressive and by age 3 appears to have slowed their socio-emotional development.

They also found that a low-income mother is most likely to start spanking a very fussy, irritable baby by the age of 1, and more likely still if the mother is depressed. Boys were spanked and yelled at more often than girls, and the poorer the family the greater the likelihood the kids would be physically and verbally punished at an early age.

The collective results suggest that the causes and effects of spanking are tightly bound together, making it difficult to tease out the influence of poverty, genetics, gender differences and cultural expectations when discussing the controversial practice.

The American Academy of Pediatrics in 1998 issued a recommendation that parents find means to correct children's behavior other than corporal punishment. A large body of evidence suggests the practice is seldom effective and may have negative effects. But some in the African American community have defended the practice, citing research showing that while spanking may make white children more aggressive, the practice makes African American children less so.

How common is it for low-income mothers to have spanked their children by the age of 1? One in three mothers told researchers that they or someone in their household had spanked their 1-year-old in the preceding week, on average doling out 2 1/2 spankings per week. By the time their children were 2 and 3, 49% of the moms in the study said they had spanked the child in the last week -- on average between 2 1/2 and three times.

Verbal punishment was less frequent than spanking: 17% of the mothers surveyed said they had yelled at a 1-year-old; 24% yelled at their 2-year-old, and 16% at their 3-year-old.

After stripping out the influence of income, African American children at all three ages were most likely to be spanked and to be verbally punished; low-income white mothers and Mexican American mothers who were more Americanized were about equally likely to spank their young children, and generally about equally likely to yell at the toddlers. Recently arrived Mexican American moms were least likely to spank a toddler, and less likely to verbally punish a 2-year-old than were other low-income moms.

The study's findings generally "paint a picture of spanking and verbal punishments as products of parental challenges (e.g., the many difficulties associated with being a young parent and/or living in poverty), and may also reflect a goal of preparing a child for a life characterized by these and other challenges," the authors write.

-- Melissa Healy

Having loads of self-confidence is a good thing, right?

Maybe not when it comes to reading skills. In a new study, researchers discovered that teenage students who were overconfident had lower reading comprehension than students who were under-confident. They analyzed reading tests and questionnaire replies of 158,848 15-year-olds in 34 countries.

In all countries, students who were overconfident were more apt to test below their country's average on reading scores. Conversely, those who were under-confident were more likely to score above the country's average.

Though instilling children with self-confidence has been a societal goal for some years, it seems there can be too much of a good thing. In this instance, the study's lead author believes that teens who are too self-assured might not be able to correctly determine their reading level.

In a news release, Ming Ming Chiu, a professor in the department of learning and instruction in the University at Buffalo's Graduate School of Education, said, "If an overconfident student chooses a book that is too hard -- such as 'The Lord of the Rings' rather than 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,' he or she might stop reading after a few pages and let it sit on a bookshelf. In contrast, a more self-aware student is more likely to finish an easier book and continue reading more books." In the study, the authors wrote, "Chronic doubts about abilities may be a sign of academic difficulties, but chronic overconfidence may also mask real academic difficulties, and students appear to perform best in all settings when displaying modest levels of [self-concept]."

The study appears in the July issue of the journal Learning and Individual Differences.

-- Jeannine Stein

Photo credit: Jessica Hill / AP