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Title: CMU researchers find intense tutoring grows brain connections
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
URL Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09343/1019563-100.stm
Published: Dec 9, 2009
Author: Mark Roth
Post Date: 2009-12-09 15:49:50 by Prefrontal Vortex
Keywords: None
Views: 17

CMU researchers find intense tutoring grows brain connections

Carnegie Mellon University scientists have shown that school children who undergo intensive remedial reading instruction actually grow new connections in their brains.

The study, being reported tomorrow in the journal Neuron, shows that 35 third and fifth graders from Allegheny County who got 100 hours of intensive instruction not only improved their reading skills, but grew new white-matter connections in the left halves of their brains, said lead researchers Marcel Just and Timothy Keller of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging.

The white matter links one brain region to another, and Drs. Just and Keller said the most likely explanation for the improvement was that as the students worked on decoding words and sentences, their brains grew new myelin -- the fatty sheathing around nerves.

Although the students improved their reading, they did not end up as skilled as 25 top readers from their classes whose brains also were scanned, even though their white-matter connections were equal at the end of the study.

Dr. Just said he was not particularly surprised by that. A physical training program might improve the exercise performance of uncoordinated students, but "they still wouldn't be as good as professional athletes," he said.

The study is one of a small number around the world that have shown that as people learn new skills, the structures of their brains can change.

The ability to grow new white matter channels in the brain might be important for a wide number of conditions, ranging from autism, which is characterized by poor connections from one brain region to another, to multiple sclerosis, where the myelin around nerves is damaged.

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