Wow! That is great! You are a very dedicated mom. Good job to Josiah. That is really nice to know, you hardly see any results like these or they get lost. I completely see how building on to prior knowledge helps. Show EK facts and then build upon it by showing other things in similar area. Very nice.
Just curious, did you make your own EK cards or buy them from Doman site. I guess the most difficult thing about EK is getting the facts and the site can be quite expensive.
Karma to you!
Oh wow Denise, that brought tears to my eyes!!! What a lucky boy he is to have a dedicated, loving mommy like you and how lucky you are to have such a precious soul :biggrin:
Hey Daddude,
Interesting topic.
Here’s a living example for you:
I learned dance from a very very young age in fact I was at the back of my sisters’ dance classes before I could walk and simply transitioned in so was in full on dancing by one (ballet, tap, jazz, acrobatics, gaelic…).
In the ballet syllabus I did we were taught theory that we memorized by rote - first position heels together and toes turned out, second position heels apart and toes turned out, third position… and so and so on. We memorized these facts about foot positions and arms positions, names of steps - all in french of course - and what they meant. These were given to us in a book that our parents (who had no balletic knowledge) helped us learn in time for our annual examinations.
Of course I learned all of these well before I was five and yet was still only using the first positions because my body could not do what my mind could. However, when I was 7 and it was time to learn third position I knew the heel of the front foot is placed half way along the back foot with toes turned out. By then I had worked out what toes turned out meant could apply the knowledge and didn’t need to be shown third or fourth open or fourth croisse or fifth positions because I could now logic them from long before memorized knowledge.
But the most convincing for me is that much of the theory we learned year after year was technical knowledge about joints and how they worked in relation to our arts. Many many years later as a teacher much of this started to come together for me. Knowledge that had been meaningless had purpose and led to ease of understanding more in depth technical facts. My sister loving the French words from ballet took up French which she speaks fluently and later learned many other languages (inlcuding latin and ancient greek). Neither of our parents are linguistically talented and ballet was our only exposure to foreign languages and this was spoken by a very Australian dance teacher.
I can’t agree with you about the riding of a bike being muscle memory. Mainly because muscle memory is in fact brain memory. It’s a term I keep trying to stop my dance teachers using as it is very misleading. The muscles get sent a request from the brain they do not react without the brain otherwise there would be no such thing as paralysis caused by spinal injury.
When we first start learning something we waste a lot of energy using opposing muscles and groups of muscles and sending a heap of individual signals to the parts of the body involved but as we become more proficient we start to use only the correct muscles stop wasting energy and start to send packages of signals to the correct muscles instead of individual signals.
One of my coaches explained it like this - when using Word to type a document you want to save you could leave the keyboard and use your mouse go up click on file scroll down to save and clicke. Or you can type cntrl s - a packet of information that is much much faster.
Have read some articles recently (I’m out of town when I get home I’ll post the links) about memory. These imply that the human brain does not in fact ever forget anything that it “learns”.
But we do lose our ability to access these memories or pathways and access to them relies on a number of things. For learned facts it seemed that the important factor was when the fact was repeated to you apparently the best way to strengthen the recall ability of a fact is to repeat the fact at the moment you are about to forget it (good luck with that one).
Ever forgotten something and then when someone says you go oh hang on I did know that but you couldn’t recall it for yourself? The information is all there for these children you just have to make sure you don’t close the paths to the recall ability of said information. This is probably why some Doman children still remember the facts and others don’t it would be entirely dependent on whether their programs were set up in a way to maximise recall ability.
When I was in college, I read a how to study book (I really wish I could remember which one, so I could buy it again). One recommendation was to go over the chapter that would be covered in class beforehand. First, you had to look at all words that were bold. You had to read all captions. Second, you had to quickly scan the whole chapter without worrying about what any of it meant. The idea behind it was this. If you come across a word or idea you have never been exposed to before, your brain starts to tune out. This can cause students’ minds to wander in class or while reading the chapter. Giving your brain just a brief exposure can help avoid this. I tried it and found that it worked. When I scanned a chapter before class, I was easily able to pay attention to the whole lecture. Whenever I was too busy to do this, my mind wandered.
This could be relevant to EK. Does early exposure to various concepts give the brain enough familiarity that the mind does not wander during reading in later years? It’s possible, of course, that there is a big difference between exposure a day before versus 10 years before. But surely that EK info is still there in the brain available for retrieval. I didn’t do EK with my own kids until about 2.5 years.
I homeschool and I noticed something interesting. I did a huge amount of early learning in science with my older child but very little in history. I had a really hard time finding age appropriate history books. I did read several of the Little House adaptations for young kids. I honestly taught I was wasting my time with science. It seemed to be going way over her head. But I really saw the effect in Kindergarten. We raced through the science lessons. They were way too easy for her. But she struggled with history. Except when learning about Pioneers, a concept she had been exposed to in the Little House books. So, I think EK does work. I don’t know if it works with infants. But I definitely think exposure in toddlerhood, even if it seems like it’s going over their heads, does seem to work. I think it probably is creating a foundation that makes later learning easier.
I want to respond to Ariel’s question “Did you make your own Ek cards?” The answer is “yes” I have tried Domans cards but find the content sometimes not that relevant. Someone already mentioned how they preferred to learn things that they would encounter such as local flowers. This is how I feel. I also like to keep the facts simpler.
Even though I feel that it’s not so much about the facts themselves as it is about what it does in the brain, I prefer to show things that I also enjoy learning that way I can be genuinely enthusiastic as I teach.
Thanks to all who have posted, I am enjoying reading everyones thoughts.
Hi,
I’d just like to confirm what many others have said. When I was little, I had all the “Mr Men” books. I swear I couldn’t remember any of them. Just the other day, my son wanted me to read Mr Strong and the story came back to me very quickly indeed.
Now, I can’t remember the story of Little Miss Splendid at all, but the box set has just arrived and I’m confident I will know it when I read the first page…
One way to think about this is to consider it from the perspective of ther anatomic brain, rather than from the perspective of the (cybernetic?) mind.
All information, new or old, stimulates synapses in the brain. Information which relates to what we already know, also will stimulate whatever pathways that information is stored in.
Thus, learning things which have practical relevance to everyday life will result in more brain stimulation than esoteric information.
Also, what the brain does is learn. And learning ANYTHING develops the brains ability to learn easily, which is called intelligence.
Thus, learning anything develops the capabilities and microanatomic circuity of the brain, and is therefore good.
But, I think it would be better to learn things of practical value.
This would stimulate previous circuits.
And the cybernetic goal of knowledge aquisition is to facilitate the use of facts as components of logical arguments.
This will occur more frequently if facts relate practically to the environment.
When i know where china is, this facilitates my reading history, philosophy, economics as they relate to china.
Thus, countries, langauages, major cities, history might have more relevance than state capitals.
I agree with you 100%, Dr. Paddy–and welcome to the forum!
To continue: Thus while i applaud much of the outright genius of glen doman and others who are supporters/practitioners of early education, i think that which is practical is learned better. Since following his teachings somewhat, my kids are fairly smart, which i thank him and my wife for; but if i try to teach my children anything, but a little more practical e.g. if birds, then the ones in CA.
A neurobiologist at UCSF, marian diamond wrote a book called Magic trees of the Mind. Anatomically, she compares the dendrites (receptive processes of brain cells) to the leaves of a tree. Thus, one could shine any color of light from any direction, and it would all be good. But i think it could be practical and that would be better. If my daughter is walking around and she knows the name of her street and can read it, then she is getting more brain stimulation than if she does not understand her environment. Or, the more she understands her environment, the more it stimulates her brain. And the stimulation is the sunlight for the magic trees of the mind.
Indeed, one set of presentations I made for my little boy is “Birds of Ohio.” Never posted it… Similarly, one of the first presentations I made for baby E. was of objects in the house. I went around and took pictures, then labelled them in a PowerPoint presentation.
But I would generalize your point beyond the “merely” practical if by that you mean information that you can “use” or that is about your immediate surroundings. The more general point that I adhere to is that knowledge is better learned if it is understood to some degree, or at least likely to be understood soon. This is why in introducing chemistry to my little boy, I spent time explaining the basics of atoms and showed lots of pictures of a few elements, instead of having him memorize the elements at age 2. I’m sure he could have, but…why? The same time could be spent learning things that he would actually understand and benefit more from in the short to medium term.
Now, I could be wrong, and maybe someone else would have done better with him (by drilling him on disconnected facts that he didn’t understand), but I think he’s doing very well in terms of being able to understand what he reads. His vocabulary is excellent, so he just finished reading Harry Potter #2 to himself, and I’m reading Pyle’s Robin Hood to him (we’re about 25-30% of the way through the 600+ page book), which he really enjoys. He didn’t remember any but a few constellations when we first revisited them recently, but because we had read so many Greek myths, he was able to associate all sorts of things with them, and (so) he was able to pick up the constellations again very quickly. He also gained a new appreciation for my old constellation presentations–but we were able to through them faster, because instead of introducing the highlights of stories he’d never read before, they now reviewed stories that he’d read several versions of. We just finished D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths today, and he was excited to learn that Castor and Pollux (the Gemini twins) were actually brothers of Helen of Troy.
I would only have to add, that if you don´t belie in EK, then don´t do it! why wais your time trying to change everybody minded?I don´t know for sure if it is good or bad, but what I do know is that they are going to have to learn the same stuff at school, where they are not going to be loved just by the fact of spending time with them, they are just going to have to learn it to spit it on a price of paper. how many teenagers do you know understand half of what they are made to memorize a long their school years?I was thought bunch of facts non related in my school days, some have since, some have nosiness at all. but no one question the schooling, no one askers, why does my kid have to be 8 hours a day in an institution?but we do question anything any one says to differ.
as I said before, live and let live!
I would only have to add, that if you don´t belie in EK, then don´t do it! why wais your time trying to change everybody minded?I don´t know for sure if it is good or bad, but what I do know is that they are going to have to learn the same stuff at school, where they are not going to be loved just by the fact of spending time with them, they are just going to have to learn it to spit it on a price of paper. how many teenagers do you know understand half of what they are made to memorize a long their school years?I was thought bunch of facts non related in my school days, some have since, some have nosiness at all. but no one question the schooling, no one askers, why does my kid have to be 8 hours a day in an institution?but we do question anything any one says to differ.
as I said before, live and let live!
It is possible to disagree with something–or with one approach to something–and also “live and let live.” Criticizing a thing, or merely analyzing it critically as we’re doing here, does not mean being intolerant of it. Maybe more to the point, if one criticizes a practice or belief, that does not necessarily imply that one would have a moral criticism of a person who does it or believes it. So if you will let us debate things intellectually without complaint, we’ll be only too happy not to criticize you morally.
Nicely put Daddude!! :yes:
My oh my, how ever did I miss this thread? Like Denise, this is a topic close to my heart, too! This is what I’ve gotten out of it since studying the subject…
According to TweedleWink, the purpose of early EK training is to populate the right brain with knowledge - kind of like filling a library with books. If done correctly (I’ll explain more about this later), when the children are older, the information will come back to them in a manner something akin to de javu - they may not remember how they know it or when they learned it only that they know it. I guess a good example would be like the one I read from Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina:
“It just jumped out at me!†Brott exclaimed to his mother. Brott had been at the podium of a symphony orchestra, conducting a piece of music for the first time, when the cellist began to play. He instantly knew he’d heard this piece before. This was no casual reminder of some similar but forgotten work: Brott could predict exactly what musical phrase was coming next. He could anticipate the flow of the entire work during the course of the rehearsal; he knew how to conduct it even when he lost his place in the score.Freaking out, he called his mother, a professional cellist. She asked for the name of the piece of music, then burst out laughing. It was the piece she had been rehearsing when she was pregnant with him. The cello was up against her late-pregnancy mid-abdomen, a structure filled with soundconducting fluids, fully capable of relaying musical information to her unborn son. His developing brain was sensitive enough to record the musical memories. “All the scores I knew by sight were the ones she had played while she was pregnant with meâ€, Brott later said in an interview. Incredible stuff for an organ not even zero years old.
I kind of get what he meant because when I was in Grade 5 on piano, my teacher made me learn a piece for an exam. The way my teacher used to teach me was to get me to sight read once through first. Ordinarily, my sight reading is crappy at best, but with this one particular piece, I played better than usual and it was a hard piece for me because the fingering was tricky. My teacher immediately asked me, “Have you played this before?” I had never played the piece before and I didn’t even remember ever having heard it before but something about it felt “familiar”. Did I listen to it when I was a child? I don’t know.
Another instance was a song I learned when I was very young. I read the lyrics again in a book when I was a teenager and I could hum the music for it even though the song was “new” to me. I only discovered that I’d learned the song as a child because my cousin later told me I used to sing it when I was little.
Even if a child cannot remember the information as clearly, learning it for the second time will very likely be easier than if they were hearing the information for the first time. For instance, I had to memorise the first 36 elements of the Periodic Table for Chemistry in Year 12. Even though I cannot recite them all now, I still remember the first ten and it will definitely be easier for me to memorise the other 26 elements if I had to learn it again now.
In this respect, I agree with Dr Paddy. If you are going to do EK, it makes more sense to cover material that will be relevant and useful to the child rather than obscure information they are unlikely to ever need.
However, based on information from Professor Makoto Shichida, EK is less about the information and more about stimulating the brain. Or perhaps he wasn’t really talking about EK, but he refers to the activity of rapidly flashing vast quantities of image flashcards to young children in order to stimulate their right brains and bring out its unique ability such as its photographic memory. In fact, someone on the forum (so sorry, I forget whom) posted a link to an article about some training involving rapid flashing in a darkened room being done with fighter pilots to help them learn to quickly distinguish between friendly and enemy planes. As a result of the training, some of them developed photographic memories. The article is here:
http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/fun/phot-mem.htm
This information seems to be in concordance with Shichida’s speed flash card activity.
Going back to EK and developing encyclopedic knowledge… How do you ensure that the child retains the information and not forget it once they are older? This is the part I have not been quite clear on. I’ve read that you only have to flash the cards once and the child will remember (but for how long?), some say, at least four times, others say, not too many times or you will be stimulating the left brain which is not what you want. Based on what I understand about the child’s brain, I think TweedleWink’s method might be the way to go. In fact, this is what they do in Heguru as well. They recommend going through the flash cards with a child a few times, then putting them away for a while, say six months or a year, depending on the child, then bringing them out and flashing them again. The first exposure opens the child’s mind to the subject and the terminology. When the child receives the second exposure (6 months or 1 year later) he/she will have had more life experiences, greater knowledge and a better understanding of the world and new connections to the information will be formed. I guess this is pretty much what Tracy and Drummerboy are saying.
However, I feel it is important to have the repeat exposures to the flashcards at set intervals - 6 months, 1 year (exactly how frequently, I don’t know but as long as it is repeated over a period of time) - to avoid synaptic pruning. I first read about this in the Science of Parenting by Margot Sunderland but since then many others say the same thing - at birth, we have more brain cells than we will ever have in our lives, but there are very few connections between them. As that baby grows, numerous connections between the brain cells will be made forming a complex network. Once the child is about two years, synaptic pruning will begin - this is when the brain cuts off connections that are deemed redundant because of disuse. My take out from this is that if you don’t do repeat exposures to the information, synaptic pruning takes place and that’s why the children cannot remember the information they learned as infants and toddlers. How much of it gets erased depends on whether you are still covering related information. For instance, if you flashed famous artists for your child but never covered any other flash cards related to art, I think it’s a safe bet that your child will most likely have no memeory of those famous artists. If, however, you went on to flash famous works of those artists and other flash cards related to art, you can expect better retention of the information. I hope that makes sense.
So does EK make sense to me? Yes, I think so. But I think parents need to be very clear on what they are trying to achieve with it - brain exercise? Knowledge retention? Because I believe that it is done will affect the future results seen in the child.
i love the neurobiology. But i would not necessarily fear synaptic pruning, it is part of natural development.
God, were he to write a patent for a computer, would need to specify each wire of every circuit.
Some computer patents have had thousands of claims and immense complexity.
Yet, He is far smarter than that.
He could say, make far more neurons than one needs, and simply prune those unused.
then make far more glial cells (each neuron has one or more secretaries) than one needs, then prune.
and dendrites-receptive areas of each neuron, make excess and prune again.
This solution takes much less space in the genome. The genome already contains more info than library of congress.
imagine there were a huge excess of phone lines connecting everywhere to everywhere else
those phone lines connecting people to people would likely be used, and therefore retained.
Phones lines connecting a cow pasture to a horse’s stable would likely not be used, and therefore lost
But they could be. if stable boys used them, they could be retained
If we had an extra 5% neurons, 5% glial cells, extra 5% dendrites, etc
Imagine how we could augment brain power. I think it happens to children of these moms.
Less about the information and more about stimulating the brain.
I wholeheartedly agree!!
I will have my children learn Tagalog. And anything else i can teach them, or anyone else can teach them.
Because most important is the computing power which results from microarchitecture of brain.
In the future, we have no idea what we will need to know or learn. But if we can learn anything well, we will be adaptible.
I’m only suggesting practical information will stimulate brain more, and more frequently.
sorry, just go me on a bad day.
you are very right, and I do belive that is what this forum is all about.
imagine a child walks down the street. Sees an unfamiliar man. they both pretty much ignore each other.
a month later she does it again. Now she recognizes mr so-and-so. They are happy to see each other, and talk happily about whatever they have in common.
In the second instance the brain recieved more stimulation. Which was because know she knows who mr so and so is. Imagine brain cells talking to each other in real time. Those with more knowledge have more to talk about. Not only the people but also the brain cells.
Thus practical knowledge about the environment makes the environmernt more stimulatory, also more fun.
Or she met the dog who frightened her before.
Now the dog is more stimulatory than before it frightened her. Environment more stimulatory.
Off topic alert!
I think you’re right on the latter point. But as to your point about the future, I say: nonsense. No offense, but this is so commonly repeated that it has become a pet peeve of mine.
Imagine someone saying to a child 75 years ago, quite accurately, that in your lifetime the world will change radically, and much new knowledge will be discovered and things that are relevant in 75 years are today unknown or unemphasized. Would it follow, 75 years ago, that we had no idea what we needed to know or learn? Of course not. There is no need to throw the curriculum out the window simply because the world is changing. Consider the elementary school subjects (or what should be such subjects) and ask yourself how many of them have changed much in the last 75 years, despite the fact that the most revolutionary technological changes in all of human history happened in this period: reading; penmanship; arithmetic; world history since ancient times; national histories; geography; science; art; music; and various others to taste.
What new subjects have become important for elementary students to know? Typing and computers…and that’s pretty much it. The only things that have become even possibly outdated are cursive handwriting and Latin (though Latin was already mostly out, 75 years ago). National history has had 75 more years’ worth of facts, but a similar observation could be made 75 and 150 years ago, and that wasn’t a reason not to learn history. Same is true of geography–we don’t not learn geography because borders will change in our lifetimes.
What gives this meme (actually, I hate the concept of “memes” but it fits in this case) some teeth is that science and technology changes and develops so fast. But the vast bulk of these changes are relevant to students at higher levels, in high school and college. And even then, we should not tell students, “You don’t have to learn brain science because the field will look totally different in 20 years.” We should say, “You really ought to learn brain science because it’s such a hot field with fascinating discoveries being made all the time.”
Just had to get that off my chest. 