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Re: As goes reading education, so goes math education
Posted:
Jun 8, 2010 6:07 PM
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Snips from a relevant NPR Story:
In the 55 years since Albert Einstein's death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.
But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein's genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
In The Name Of Science
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.
Einstein's Brain Unlocks Some Mysteries Of The Mind:
After performing Albert Einstein's autopsy, the pathologist put the brain in a jar of formaldehyde and made off with it. That single act torpedoed his reputation, but years later it helped researchers learn more about how our minds work. It turns out that Einstein's brain had more of certain key cells, which were previously thought to be unimportant.
What Came In A Mayonnaise Jar:
One scientist who'd asked for samples was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. She wanted pieces from four areas in Einstein's brain.
Diamond doesn't talk about her part of this story anymore. But during a 1985 lecture in New York, she described what happened after she asked Harvey for the samples: Harvey agreed to send them, she said, but months went by and nothing happened. Then, three years later, the chunks of brain tissue arrived by mail in a mayonnaise jar.
At the time, the 1980s, most scientists still believed all the important work in the brain was done by neurons. And researchers had already learned from other samples of Einstein's brain that he didn't have a lot of extra neurons.
But Diamond was fascinated by another type of brain cell, called a glial cell. Glia means glue. And the assumption back then was that glial cells were just glue holding a brain together.
Diamond wanted to see if there were more of the glial cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in Einstein's brain. So she counted them and found that there were, especially in the tissue from an area involved in imagery and complex thinking.
The discovery got a fair amount of attention in the media. But scientists really didn't know what to make of it, says Doug Fields, a brain researcher at the National Institutes of Health.
It was "just an intriguing and peculiar finding, and kind of made people wonder what these astrocytes could be doing," Fields says.
Paul, I wonder if it is the "glial cells" that help us intuit and make predictions? Textual or mathematical?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126229305&sc=nl&cc=es-20100606
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